


It Would've Been Sweet, If It Could've Been Me

by beaubashley, Yours_Truly_Commander_Shepard



Category: Dragon Age - All Media Types, Dragon Age: Inquisition
Genre: A Bar Fight, A Halla Named Kitten, All The Tropes, Ambiguous/Open Ending, Chapter 7 is beaubeau's beautiful comic, Comic, Dragon Age: Masked Empire references, Eventual Smut, F/M, Fake Dating, Hangover, Huddling For Warmth, Hurt/Comfort, If I Missed Any Tropes Let Me Know, Implied/Referenced Threat of Sexual Violence, Marauding Shems, No Love Triangle, Pre-Canon, Pre-Dragon Age: Inquisition, Sickfic, Solas Being Solas (Dragon Age), Solas Gets Topped in the Temple of June, Solas Mansplains Bears, alcohol use, so there's that to look forward to
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-11-10
Updated: 2021-02-10
Packaged: 2021-03-08 18:20:58
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 8
Words: 22,378
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27481111
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/beaubashley/pseuds/beaubashley, https://archiveofourown.org/users/Yours_Truly_Commander_Shepard/pseuds/Yours_Truly_Commander_Shepard
Summary: Two elves meet by chance on the road west. They'll never see each other again. Definitely not. Probably not. Maybe not.
Relationships: Female Inquisitor/Solas (Dragon Age), Female Lavellan/Solas, Fen'Harel | Solas/Female Lavellan, Fen'Harel | Solas/Original Female Character(s)
Comments: 143
Kudos: 137
Collections: Smutty





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> What up elff*ckers, I'm going nuts from the election stress, so I wrote a seven-layer trope dip. 
> 
> ***
> 
> Gifted to beaubeau because I made her beta this and I still don't think she's listened to Folklore.

The day began with promise. The thin veneer of frost on the edges of the fallen leaves looked ready to melt under the first pink rays of dawn, rising clear and bright after several sunrises of fog and gloom in the late Fereldan autumn. Until then, the world sparkled, and Solas breathed the heady air into his lungs, exhaling in a puff of steam before peeling himself out of his bedroll. He nearly doused the embers of last night’s campfire with a thought, but hesitated after a glance at the large, flat rock at the edge of his campsite.

It was difficult to tell, after the wear of the ages, but the group of boulders where Solas had made camp had once been a small shrine to Sylaise and still preserved something of their ancient wards. And someone had left a gift--not on the altar, where offerings would have been made, but on the first step, where a penitent would have knelt. 

Two plump pigeons, already cleaned and plucked, were laid on a placemat of breech branches. Breakfast, he supposed. 

For two and a half days, Solas had been followed. He had first noticed as he made camp three evenings previous; there was no sound, no snap of twig or rustle of branches, but the unseen visitor crossed the gossamer strands of his furthest wards. Those wards were meant to alert, not to harm, and he gathered what they had to tell him: the intruder had no ill intent and had not called upon the Fade. When the intruder crossed the next ring alive and unharmed, he also learned that they were elven, or as elven as the short-lived creatures who sleepwalked through the ruins of his world could be called. 

Solas waited for the visitor to announce their purpose as he built up the campfire (with flint and steel, not arcane means) and pretended to enjoy his nightly meal of boiled porridge in a tin cup. But whoever it was came no closer than an arrow’s flight from his campfire, and after a few minutes, his wards told him that they had withdrawn. 

Solas wrapped himself in a thicker layer of wards that night to sleep, but assumed the contact to have been accidental, undesired by both parties. 

The next morning, however, as he made his way back to the ancient Alamarri trail running parallel to the main Tevinter route west, he found an unmistakable message on a freshly split log, set in the middle of the track: two handfuls of late raspberries with a sprig of elfroot in the middle of the pile. A small welcome from a fellow traveler. And for the first time in many days, Solas smiled. 

That pleasure did not last past the next evening, when he turned around and discovered half a turtle shell full of hazelnuts at the edge of his camp. The hazelnuts were followed the subsequent evening by a bough hanging with slightly frostbitten pears, and the next morning by a haunch of venison. He had not yet managed to catch a glimpse of the elf who followed him despite Solas’ best efforts to leave no trail as he traveled west. 

Today, he took the time to spit and roast the pigeons before setting out, acknowledging the gift, even if the gift-giver had withdrawn before dawn. 

There had been little welcome for Solas since he awoke. What few alliances he had made had been a matter of momentarily congruent purpose or explicit exchange. Whatever elf it was who had followed Solas for three evenings could not have known of his purpose, but had taken it upon him or herself to feed him better than he had so far managed, like a mother lynx whose kitten had proved a poor hunter by late autumn. 

Solas was perfectly capable of capturing game, which fell as well as men did when shocked with a lightning bolt or charred with a fireball, but he preferred to exercise discretion when traveling alone in his guise as a humble wanderer. Nonetheless, he thought, sucking the meat off a wingbone, he did hate porridge. 

He kept his eyes alert for his unknown friend as he returned to the trail for the day’s march, but as in the two previous days, he saw nothing. The main road was crowded with pilgrims and refugees, not to mention combatants from the brewing war between mages and templars, but this track was silent. 

He took the time to enjoy the woods. The majesty of nature was one of the few pleasures his Veil could not choke off, and the trees were aflame with the colors of fall. He would miss this once Felassan delivered the eluvian network to him and he travelled the Crossroads instead of the backcountry of Thedas. And once his orb was unlocked, he supposed he would be too busy to travel at all. 

The day’s early promise--the weather, the woods, his full stomach--yielded to misfortune soon enough, however. The Alamarri trail grew closer to the Imperial highway as he reached the outskirts of Redcliffe, and eventually merged at the narrow pass between the river and the ridge. And on the main road, there were many who offered him much less welcome than his unseen benefactor. 

A lone elf was considered prey in most of Thedas, most certainly by the heavily-armed men running a hastily-assembled tollbooth a hundred yards from the bridge across the Dhrine. 

A large pile of provisions, haphazardly tossed into a cluster of rickety carts, constituted the proceeds of their tolling. 

Solas carried nothing precious on his person, and his pack had nothing of interest to the local bullies. Still, he narrowed his eyes as they approached, gauging whether he would need to spend the rest of the afternoon hiding bodies. 

Their leader quoted a ridiculously inflated price for the use of the bridge behind him--a sum Solas did not have, and which no elf in Thedas might have confidently carried through the Fereldan hinterlands. The others laughed, an ugly sound, and Solas began mentally cataloguing the spells that might bring the interaction to its quickest close.

As he looked to the trees (he would need a large woodfall to hide the largest warrior, he thought), he saw a flicker of movement. Solas jerked his chin closer to his chest so as not to betray his line of sight, but saw the movement resolve into the figure of a woman, leaning out of a break at the thick underbrush flanking the road. The movement was the line of her arm as she strung and drew a longbow, aimed at the man who reached out to push Solas’ shoulder in traditional provocation. His unknown guardian stood ready to defend him from his human accosters. Very unnecessarily. 

Feeling the first twinge of real unease since he’d encountered the group of knights, Solas shook his head in an exaggerated fashion. He was in no danger from the louts, but he could hardly rip them apart with the power of the Fade while observed by the stranger. 

He subtly moved aside to put his face and the three warriors’ backs to the edge of the woods. The elf slowly lowered her bow and replaced it around her shoulder. She put a finger to her lips. 

Solas bit the inside of his cheek in anger. The tollmen looked determined to have their sport with him, and there was nothing he could do without endangering the woman in the woods. From him, if not from them. 

He startled again as she slunk below the level of the high grass and ran at a crouch, more quickly than he could have expected, towards their pile of loot. 

Solas tried to keep his growing surprise off his face. The last thing he needed was a confrontation that drew attention. No other travelers had appeared in the short time he was threatened, but more could arrive at any moment. 

One of the knights nearly turned to follow Solas’ line of sight, but Solas pulled his backpack off and set it at his feet, feigning meekness as best he was able. The man called him a slur in a jovial tone, and began sorting through Solas’ possessions.

Solas did not dare look again at the pile of loot, registering rapid movements only out of the corner of his eye. He hoped the forest elf was quick in her mission, because he had little in his backpack to interest the looters. 

The men quickly unpacked and fouled Solas’ supplies, few as they were. His dried jerky. The oats he kept for porridge. His tinderbox. 

By the time they groaned and swore, having found nothing worthy of taking, the woman had vanished back into the trees. Solas did not assume she had gone, though, so he gritted his jaw hard when the leader slapped him and cursed him for being as poor as he deserved. Solas let himself be driven back the way he came, abandoning his plan to make the crossing. 

Solas walked in the opposite direction for nearly fifteen minutes before he turned off the path and walked into the woods. His mood had plummeted, and his jaw was aching. It was time to confront his follower; he could not walk all the way to the Orlesian border under surveillance. 

“I think it is time that we were acquainted,” Solas announced to the empty forest in Elvish. The woods did not answer back. 

He imagined that his impatient posture made his position clear enough, but it took nearly a quarter hour of standing and stewing before a figure melted out of the woods.

She approached slowly, hands out and bow unstrung and stowed on her own pack. 

Before Solas could open his mouth to demand answers, she called out, in accented Elvish, “are you alright, then?” 

A flush of shame lit his cheeks. This woman’s motivations were unknown, but thus far, she’d done nothing but feed him and offer to protect him against human thugs. He shoved his annoyance at the delay down and stood still for her cautious approach. 

He was surprised to note her age as she drew nearer. He had somehow expected a maternal figure, in light of the unsought aid, but she was at least a decade younger than his apparent age, perhaps more. Her skin was tanned from exposure to the outdoors, and her hair was brown except at her temples and the tip of her long braid, where it was bleached golden by the sun. She wore plain Dalish leathers over her lean and muscular frame, nearly reaching his own height. Once she was only a few paces away, he could pick out Andruil’s arrows in faint yellow ink across her cheeks. 

Of course she was Dalish. What other manner of elf would be wandering these woods alone in such dangerous times? 

Aside from the Dread Wolf himself, of course. 

Her head was cocked as she made her own assessment, brown eyes fixed on his swelling cheek. Before he could object, she drew within arm’s reach and pressed a calloused fingertip to his jaw, whistling in sympathy through her teeth even as he ducked his head away. 

“I have some salve for that,” she said in Common. 

“Ma serannas,” he replied in Elvish, forcing himself to manners. “But I would first ask why you have been following me.” 

Her eyebrows lifted. “Following you? I’m simply headed in the same direction.” Her Elvish was halting. 

Solas narrowed his eyes at her. “Do I not have you to thank for the supplies of the last few days?”

She smirked at him. “Oh no, you do. And we’ll eat even better tonight, once you see what I took from those shems.” 

Before he could protest to demand further explanation, she pulled her own pack off and set it between them. She squatted on her heels and began to display the results of her thievery: a jar of honeycomb, a box of spices, several ornamental daggers...he was amazed she’d managed to take so much in the few moments he’d been detained. 

“You’d think that the third roadblock in fifty miles wouldn’t manage to steal much from the refugees, but those shems had taste,” she remarked, hefting a small sack of truffled salt with due appreciation. 

Solas hadn’t thought she was particularly attractive upon first impression, but her wide and curling smile as she catalogued her finds had him reassessing that determination. 

He cleared his throat to interrupt her. “The question remains...why?”

She cocked her head at him, giving him a slow, assessing blink. “I saw one of the People traveling poorly, and I thought that you needed the help. Was I wrong?”

Solas stared at her. She was wrong. There was probably no other elf in Thedas who needed protection less than he did. But…

His chest clenched a little bit that someone had sought to offer it to him.

“You thought I was Dalish?” he clarified. 

The Dalish woman stood, dusting her palms on her leather leggings. She snorted in disagreement. “Not with the way you make camp, no.” She seemed to consider the matter closed and rolled her shoulders in determination. “There’s a crossing about five miles downriver,” she told him. “I hear it’s a tricky ford, so I’d rather do it while the light is good.” 

She seemed to take it for granted that he was coming with her. Of course, unless he was sure that she was gone, the bridge was now out of question. She settled her pack on her shoulders and looked at him expectantly before turning to go. 

“Just like that?” Solas blurted. He was missing something. He did not understand what had happened. 

She cast him a look over her shoulder. “I got the impression you didn’t want to talk, but we can if you’d like.”

Solas twisted his lower lip. “I am called…” he searched his memory for a suitable name, one used by the wretched city elves confined to their alienages. A name that any other had called him over his long life was too valuable to be spent carelessly on the road. He planned to leave no trace of his movements. 

She perceived his delay. “You don’t have to tell me,” she said with amusement. “I like the quiet, anyway.” 

It was only after he watched her stride off into the trackless woods, expecting him to follow, that he realized that she had not offered her own name, either.

* * *

After a few minutes walking deeper into the backcountry, his guide put her fingers to her mouth and blew out a whistle. 

Solas tensed, surprised and apprehensive, but no troop of hostile Dalish appeared. Instead, a single laden halla without hobble or bridle soon trotted out of the trees, bearing several saddlebags. 

The snowy white creature cast him a suspicious look and blew out a disdainful snort in his direction when the Dalish woman ran a soothing hand over its forehead. 

“I did not think they travelled outside of a herd,” Solas could not help but remark. He had not known that they could come when called either. 

The woman smiled at the halla. “Vherlen thinks that I am her herd,” she said. “Her mother dropped triplets, so I had to feed her with a twisted rag for months. She was the runt.” 

The halla was smaller than the others he’d seen, even accounting for their diminution in the ages he’d slept. 

“Kitten?” Solas clarified. “You named your halla ‘kitten’?” 

The Dalish woman turned and grinned at him. “Your Elvish is better than mine. My mother wouldn’t let me have a pet, so the hallamaster named this one for me. Lucky for you, that’s how I can carry so much in the way of supplies.”

Her tone judged that he’d been on the verge of starving without her intervention. Of course, there was no reason for her to guess he was anything but a refugee--or that he had drops of supplies scattered for his agents’ use at regular intervals between here and Halamshiral. 

He’d lose her after the crossing, he decided. Wait for her to sleep, then spend the night putting distance between the two of them. If she was merely the fellow traveler she claimed to be, there was no reason for their paths to intersect again.

* * *

They did not speak as she led him and the halla through the wide dark of the forest. He thought they were traveling generally southwest, but his woodcraft was not equal to hers. 

The trees suddenly gave way to a wide, marshy riverbank. The ground had grown muddy and soft. This late in the season, the insects were few, but still noisy, as were the sounds of the marsh birds. 

“It should be shallow enough for us to cross here,” his guide reported after peeking through the reeds. Then she began to take off her clothes; she was already barefoot, but she was making rapid work of the toggles and laces that held her clothing together. 

His face must have told a story, because she tipped her head back and laughed when she noticed. 

“Don’t get excited, I just don’t want to carry them wet,” she said, turning around as she stripped off her jacket and shirt, and then lashed them to the top of the halla’s back. 

He turned away before she took off her trousers. 

“I’ll wait for you on the other side if you want to cross separately,” she told his back. 

And he did not particularly want to strip in front of a strange woman, but he did not have a change of clothing with him, and he thought he’d better follow her as she crossed. 

Thus, he was treated to a view of her tan lines while he followed her and the halla through the hip-deep water. Well. It was not quite hip-deep. Her hips were still clearly visible over the flow of the icy water as she let the beast find its footing on the slick rocks, causing him some minor consternation and to nearly fall on his face in the river. 

When she reached the opposite bank of the river, she gave a yell and did a small jig to shake off the remaining water, shimmying like an angry, wet cat. Solas was glad that she very conspicuously did not look at him until he had a chance to pull his own trousers back on. 

It was by then late afternoon, and his guide suggested that they make camp while she found dinner. Solas did not object to the idea that they would be camping together that night, considering the earlier halt to further his plans of departing and putting ground between them. 

Once they located a suitable clearing, Solas kicked forest debris away from a dirt circle and gathered firewood as the Dalish woman strung her bow and vanished into the trees. Her halla, unladen, grazed a short distance away from the place they had both dropped their packs. 

It was too trusting of her, Solas thought. To leave all her supplies with him. She had no reason to think he was trustworthy--and he was not, after all. Perhaps she thought she would be able to track him down should he steal from her and go, but the element of surprise was fatal in most betrayals. He could easily do worse than raid her belongings. She ought to have taken care against him. 

But until she returned an hour later, carrying a small, fat ram across her shoulders, butchered somewhere else, he did nothing worse than start the fire and unroll his bedroll near his pack. 

She had a small stewpot among her belongings, and she cut up the ram into it, seasoning it with a handful of dried mushrooms from her stores and a few judicious pinches of the spices she had stolen earlier in the day. Once their dinner was cooking, she pulled a few purses from her pack and peered into them. She had to have taken them from the knights at the bridge, who had been robbing travelers in turn. 

“You need money?” she asked. She tossed a purse around the fire to him. He opened it to find several silver and a good handful of copper pieces. It would pay for a few nights at an inn, or the tolls for the rest of his journey. 

“Do you not?” he asked, prepared to pass the purse back to her. He rarely needed money, and would have access to treasuries full of gold as soon as Felassan delivered the eluvians. 

The Dalish woman shrugged. “Not worth the risk to go to town, usually,” she responded, tapping her vallaslin. “Most shems assume we got it through banditry.”

“I cannot imagine why,” he said dryly. 

She laughed, taking his point. Then she tossed him another purse. After consideration, he stowed them away, resolving to put the funds to charitable use in the future. 

After they finished their dinner, she carried the carcass off into the woods, then strung up a rope hammock along a thick tree branch at the edge of the circle of firelight. 

Solas was unfamiliar with the practice, but he could perceive the advantages. It would keep her away from animals and insects as she slept, and the hammock could be rigged so that rain would run off an overhanging tarp. 

It would be cold, though, with no tent. Perhaps her destination was near. He would need to take care, if these woods were the home of a Dalish clan. 

“Good night,” she called as she climbed into the rigging. 

She had not asked him any questions. Perhaps it was merely a lack of curiosity. The Dalish he had encountered thus far had certainly not been interested in anything he had to tell them. Perhaps she had nothing but disdain for a flat ear she considered ill-equipped for his journey.

He would never know for certain what her motives were, he thought. He would take care that their paths did not cross again. 

He climbed into his own bedroll and waited until he could feel her connection to the Fade take hold. Then he rose and re-packed his own belongings. 

Solas had the sudden wish that he could do something for her. She had not asked a single thing of him, and it pained him that he had nothing to offer her--nothing a Dalish would accept, anyway.

Solas reminded himself that when he restored the world of the elves, all those like her would benefit. She might yet enjoy thousands of years of life--a life that would not require her to travel alone through the woods, fearful of human predation. He hoped she would. 

Still, he hesitated a moment longer by the fire once he had donned his backpack, and eventually murmured a half-forgotten prayer for travelers. It called upon Mythal, who might still listen, to protect her on her journey, wherever it went. He cast a ward around her campsite that would persist for some days, even in his absence. She seemed more than capable, but it relieved his conscience to leave her with it. 

And then Solas strode off into the night, leaving his unnamed guide behind. 


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> ALL THE TROPES.

The inn smelled unpleasantly of wet wool, unwashed human, and burnt food. Solas would never have chosen such a place without dire need, but he had seen low, grey stormclouds on the horizon mere hours before nightfall. This late in the year, whether they brought freezing rain or unseasonable snow, he did not wish to be caught in them. He had no map of the area, and there was no indication that he would find any other shelter on the wide, cultivated plains that lay between him and the Frostbacks. 

And so Solas had hurried his steps to the nearest settlement, which turned out to be a small cluster of wood and stone buildings lacking an elven quarter and featuring only a single “inn,” which was merely a somewhat larger hovel with a firepit in the center. It sold berths around the fire, ale safe to drink only by virtue of its alcohol content, and a high likelihood that all visitors would require future delousing. 

He would almost rather have chanced the weather, but after he seated himself in an unoccupied corner, hooded cloak drawn up to cover his face as best he could without making himself conspicuous, he heard the hiss of sleet as it struck the timbers of the roof. Grimacing, he consigned himself to a wary, uncomfortable evening on the floor of the common room. 

He thought he was the only elf present, which was always an invitation to the worst kind of human, and the worst kind of human was present that night. The farmers and other locals were unlikely to trouble him, if also unlikely to interfere with any trouble, but there were a number of burly men with clubs and swords clipped to their belts; travelers better classified as raiders, driven inside by the weather and getting drunker by the minute. 

Solas did not lift his head for each new entrant to the increasingly crowded room, but a little stir went around when the door opened for a particularly lengthy blast of the cold, wet wind. When Solas finally dared a glance to the entrance, he went still as he recognized the figure by the door. 

Wet and dripping ice crusted the edges of her patchwork leather cloak as she cautiously looked around the room. Solas let out a hiss through closed teeth; this was no place for a Dalish, least of all a lone woman. The only other women in the room were working it, and the atmosphere was sullen from the weather and the likelihood of a muddy next day’s travel. 

His past acquaintance looked at his corner, and he saw her pause for a moment. He stilled, wondering what he would do if she called out and demanded answers. But after a weighty handful of seconds, her gaze moved away. She would not pretend to know him. 

He wondered at the tiny thread of disappointment that colored his relief. 

He took another sip of the bitter ale to gather himself as the Dalish woman paid for a spot on the floor and aimed for the only open bench in the corner opposite Solas’ own, less desirable for its distance from the fire. He wondered where she had left her halla. Whether her presence in this inn, on the main road, reflected some misfortune in the three days since they parted. Or merely her exercise of the same calculations he had made. 

She picked her path poorly as she wove among the rough wooden tables crowding the room. She passed too close to the table lodging the largest group of armed men, and a hand snaked out to grab her wrist. 

“Hey,” said the lout, whose blonde beard was streaked with orange at the corners of his mouth. “You made me spill my drink.” 

He lifted his tankard and poured the contents onto the Dalish woman’s feet. They were wrapped in rags against the cold and stained with mud, but she jerked back a step to avoid the dregs as they splashed onto the ground. 

The raider did not let go of her wrist, and the woman’s hood fell back, clearly exposing her elven features and vallaslin.

Another stir passed through the tavern as attention focused on the pair. Some of it was apprehensive, but the bulk of it was anticipatory. 

The woman swallowed, her eyelids dipping to half-mast. 

“I apologize,” she said softly, her head bowed in a show of submission. “Perhaps I could buy you another.” Solas clenched his jaw, anger and tension coiling in his stomach. 

The raider huffed in derision but released her wrist. Some of the tension in the room flowed away and Solas’ grip on his tankard relaxed. 

She dipped a hand into her pocket and came out with a pair of copper coins. She set them on the table and took another step away. _Keep walking_ , he thought. 

“...fucking rabbit,” said a second lout, loud enough to carry.

The first laughed, a grating sound. “Hey lads, what’s it like, fucking a rabbit in the rain?” 

The woman paused, even as Solas mentally urged her to keep moving. 

“...soft and _wet_ ,” the raider finished his own crude joke. He turned his head and spat in the general direction of the Dalish traveler. She halted, and Solas' heart rate picked up again.

He subtly pushed his bench back from the table in readiness. The woman took another step away. The moment oozed by. It might have passed. 

But Solas’ former guide whirled like a striking snake and landed a sucker punch along the jaw of the first raider, as neat as a prizefighter. The man toppled off his bench, falling into the puddle of ale he’d just created. As his friends gaped at the Dalish woman, she took a fast sidestep and popped the second man, the first to call her a slur, with a haymaker to the face. He honked in pain as his nose shattered. 

There was another second of shocked silence as the rest of the tavern took in the sudden outbreak of violence, broken immediately afterward by the sound of benches scraping the floor as half of the men in the room jumped to their feet and the other half lurched away to clear space for the first. 

Solas cursed, leaping to his own feet. He somehow registered the white flash of the Dalish woman’s teeth even in the growing pandemonium--people had begun to shout, and the second man she’d hit was screaming about his nose--because her expression was incandescent with that kind of battle rage that was almost joy. 

Solas knew it well himself. It lit in him as he lifted his heavy wooden tankard and flung it at the head of a man who approached the Dalish woman with his arms outstretched to capture her from behind. His target staggered as the mug bounced off his skull, and the Dalish woman danced a further step away. 

Solas kicked over his table to put a small barrier between the rest of the room and the knot of current combatants. The Dalish woman was throwing punches like a seasoned brawler, but she was outnumbered at least five to one, and that ratio was only going to grow. Solas cursed as he caught one lunging raider by the back of the shirt, swinging him around so that he could strike the human’s windpipe with the blade of his hand. 

He was the Dread Wolf. The Great Betrayer. He had razed an empire. He had reshaped the nature of reality and he would do it again. And he was in his first bar fight in thousands of years, one which showed no signs of dissipating when his acquaintance kicked her first target in the floating ribs. She shouted a poorly-conjugated elvish curse upon his bodily functions. 

The madwoman was not even trying to fight her way closer to the door! 

Moving through a brawl was a matter of muscle memory more than conscious design, but Solas evaded the bodies between him and the place where the Dalish woman was doing battle with the table of raiders. A few men on the edges of the melee were beginning to reach for weapons, which meant it was really time to go. 

As covertly as he could, Solas flicked his wrist to send a spark up to the rafters where it would catch on the greasy thatching of the roof. 

He seized his former guide by the edge of the cloak and yanked her toward the exit, using knees and elbows to fend off other assailants. She did not cease fighting until she smelled the smoke, and then she turned only long enough to meet his eyes and nod emphatically as they both took flight to the doorway, bumped hips and elbows as they wedged through it, and started to run as soon as the stinging cold wind hit their faces. 

As they sprinted away, Solas realized that he still held the corner of her cloak. He could barely see two paces in front of himself in the dark and mist, but he could hear at least two pursuers behind them over the hue and cry as the tavern emptied in response to the fire. He held on tighter. They ran on, not daring to spare the time to turn and check to see if they were still being followed after the first mile down the road. 

His chest burned as they went--his legs were longer than the other elf’s, but he was having trouble keeping up. He might as well have been swimming for the way the freezing rain caught in his face and choked his mouth and nose. 

_Weak_ , he scorned himself. It might have been some millennia since he had last run for his life in the literal sense, but he should have prepared for that eventuality. Solas was about to suggest making a stand when the Dalish woman veered to the right, pulling them from the beaten road and into the sucking mud of the shoulder. Solas stumbled along as she vaulted a split-log fence and held her hand out to him to assist him over after her. 

There was straw stubble on the field on the other side of the fence and the muddy footprints of others filling with precipitation. It must have been recently harvested. He assumed that she meant to hide their trail in the existing tracks. 

Their pursuers were some distance behind them by then, so they jogged more slowly across the field. Solas could barely see where to put his feet in the dark, but he did not dare to cast a light. Dark shapes loomed as he followed the Dalish woman, who seemed to have less trouble picking her way through the field. 

Solas thought they’d gone perhaps a mile off the road when she tugged him close to one of the dark shapes by the hand, then ducked down into a crouch. 

Haystacks. Large ones, full of freshly harvested green hay, twice his height or more. They were conical, offering a slight lip at the height of their waists where rain rolled off. His comrade burrowed into the side, excavating a hollow just large enough for the two of them to duck in and keep all but their elbows and feet out of the rain.

He was wet and chilled to the bone, so cold his teeth were beginning to rattle in his skull, and she had to be even worse off, considering she’d come into the inn out of the rain in the first place. 

They did not speak as they huddled into the small hollow, unashamedly pressing shoulder to shoulder to gain some small space where their body heat and the absence of fresh rain might generate a survivable temperature. 

After a minute, the Dalish woman squirmed to twist her leather cloak around so that it hung over her front, then spread it over the both of them. Even soaking wet, as an insulating layer it reflected some warmth back to them. Solas was not sure it would be enough. The rain was still falling, and he could feel his companion’s body shaking.

“Perhaps we would be warmer if we kept moving,” he suggested, somewhat contradicted by his breathless tone. 

“You were about to fall over,” she responded, which was rude, and also accurate. 

“The haystack may collapse,” he pointed out.

“It won’t. I’ve slept in these before.” After a moment, she asked, “Can you do anything to help us keep warm?” 

Solas blinked, trying to parse her meaning. “What?”

She made a gesture that he could not quite follow in the darkness, a flick of her fingers. Her hand was bruised and the knuckles split from the brawl. There was nothing he could do about that. 

“A spell, or something,” she said after a hesitation. 

So she hadn’t missed his cast back in the inn. Solas wondered how many others had noticed, a sullen anger brewing in his stomach. The answer to her question was yes, he did know several spells that could be used for warming and weatherproofing, and once might have cast them as easily as breathing, but the fine strands of magic required could no longer be conjured through the Veil, and in any event would not be plausibly known by a wandering apostate.

“I could set the haystack on fire,” he responded, unable to keep the annoyance from his voice. She could take that as an offer, a confession of the extent of his abilities, or a threat. 

“Thanks but no,” she said after a beat. After another moment, she wormed her arm under his, cuddling it to her chest, allowing her to scoot infinitesimally closer. He considered pulling out his bedroll, but it was likely soaked through as well. They shivered together. Her body was a small slice of warmth in the biting cold of the night. 

“So, the weather was nice until today,” she remarked after a few more minutes. He nearly choked on the inanity of it. 

“I thought you preferred the quiet?” he snapped. 

She tipped her head back and laughed at him for taking the bait, and Solas ground his teeth.

“I missed you too, Blue-Eyes,” she told him fondly. 

“They’re not even blue,” he peevishly responded, considering a second too late again that he was still falling for her needling. 

Giving up on his affront on a weighty exhale, Solas allowed the side of his head to fall against hers in surrender.

“Where is your halla?” he asked in an offering of truce. 

“She’s fine for now,” his companion responded. “Unlike me, she’s got a fur coat. I left her a bit outside town.” 

Solas shook his head. “What possessed you to go into that inn?” 

The Dalish woman rubbed her cheek against his shoulder to dislodge a droplet of sweat or rain that had collected there. “I might ask you the same thing.”

But she didn’t. So he didn’t pursue it either. 

After an hour or so, the freezing rain dissipated to a faint fog, and the Dalish woman stood and peered out of their haystack hideaway. The normal sounds of night--frogs, owls, insects--had begun to reassert themselves. 

“I have to go get Vherlen,” she told him. “Stay here.” Before taking a step away, she undid her cloak and left it over Solas, then slid her backpack into the hollow next to him. 

“You need those,” he objected. He had stopped shivering before the rain ended, but it might always start again and catch her on the road. 

“I’ll be back,” she said, her voice kind, as though she had been the one who left in the middle of the night. “There’s no place to camp for hours around here, so I’m afraid it’s the haystack for the rest of the night for both of us. Too dark for you to walk, even if you were in shape to do it.” It was the closest thing to a reproach she’d offered. 

She hesitated, then squatted back down in front of him. 

“I will come back,” she said soothingly, seemingly concerned that he might think she was abandoning him to the chill of the night and their pursuers from town. “Just half an hour, no more, I promise.” 

“I believe you will,” he sighed.

* * *

Solas fell into a doze until she returned, even as uncomfortable as it was to sit in wet clothes in a muddy Fereldan field beneath a stubbly haystack. He touched the Fade for only a moment; there was no sign that others were searching for him, but a passing Pride demon pointed at him and laughed. He awoke with a start to the snorting of the halla, who considered the nighttime journey to be far beyond the bounds of decent behavior.

The Dalish woman, who he had mentally assigned the name ‘Nue,’ or ‘trouble,’ had returned and pulled a tarp from one of the saddlebags. She arranged it to cover their side of the haystack, keeping the wind and any further rain off of them. She then unrolled enough damp blankets from both of their packs to create a pallet beneath it. It was certain to be the worst place he’d ever slept, even though he’d spent a few weeks in Andruil’s dungeons, and that was judging the sleeping arrangement before Nue invited her halla to come in and share the space with them. 

The animal was warm and quiet, he allowed, but it stunk like every Dalish encampment he’d ever visited. 

“Do you think you could light some of those fence ties on fire if I dragged them over?” she prodded him. “It’s going to be a long, cold night, and our clothes aren’t going to dry.” 

“Everything in the entire world is soaked, and I am trying not to scream out that I am an apostate to every stranger I meet,” Solas groused, even though he was fairly certain he could still light anything on fire that he wanted to. 

Nue’s smile was a little strained when she pulled him under the tarp, giving up on the idea of a campfire. 

“You know I don’t care,” she told him, arranging him so that his back was to the haystack and she and the animal lay between the cold night air and his sodden person. 

“About?”

“The apostasy.”

He couldn’t help a sound of derision. “A very Dalish attitude.” Fatigue and the chill had rubbed off all veneer of civility. 

“You expect me to worry what the Chantry thinks?”

“No, I do not expect the Dalish to care about what I do at all.” He shouldn’t sound as bitter as he did, but the sting of their rejection still burned. Even if one particular Dalish fit nicely against the shape of his body. 

At his sullen rejoinder, Nue squirmed around until she faced him, their noses uncomfortably close. Her elbows and knees were jammed against his, and her fists rested against his chest. 

Her eyes narrowed. “Which clan was it?” 

“Pardon?”

“Which clan did you meet?”

Solas was tempted to lie, but also too tired to come up with a convincing evasion. “Virnehn.”

The Dalish woman raised her eyebrows and flexed her lips to the side. “Ah,” she said in a tone of great satisfaction. “That explains it.” 

“What does?”

“Clan Virnehn. Their Keeper is an utter bitch. So rude.”

A startled laugh rattled out of his chest despite his best effort to suppress it.

“Oh really?” he asked, his throat tightening for no reason he could explain as Nue’s grin widened. 

“Absolutely. At the last Arlath’vhen, nobody wanted to park their aravel next to hers. She threw a dance, and nobody outside of her clan even came. No, you’ve just had the terrible luck to run into the worst Keeper in Thedas. In fact, if I saw her right now, I would punch her in the nose.” Her eyes creased at the corners as she lied with greater and greater aplomb. She shook the fist in question under his chin. 

“Clan Virnehn’s Keeper was a man,” he replied, his voice as dry as his clothing was not. 

“Well,” Nue replied after a pause, trying to stifle her giggle until it burbled in her throat, “Everything else I said was true, wasn’t it?” 

“After tonight, I dare not guess which rude people you might punch in the nose if provoked.” 

Nue chuckled, flipping over to present her back to him again. “I would punch every Dalish Keeper who made you think we wouldn’t take you in, I promise you that.” 

He believed that too. 

* * *

Solas did not expect to sleep well, tucked against the haystack with Nue’s backside pressed against him and the tip of her braid tickling his nose where it was looped across her shoulders and her halla within arm’s reach, but fatigue drew him down into what felt like an endless pit of dreamless sleep. The blue light of morning eventually crawled beneath his eyelids and forced them open, but wakefulness felt out of reach. 

He lay under all the blankets, and the tarp had been rearranged to shield a very small fire less than a pace away, just a handful of smoking green twigs supporting his tin cup and its contents. 

“On dhea,” Nue greeted him when she saw him move. She squatted next to the fire, stripped to the waist save for a desultorily-wrapped breastband. Her jacket and shirt hung to dry from sticks poked into the mud. “You snore,” she informed him triumphantly. 

“I do not,” he immediately retorted, but his voice emerged in an unfamiliar croak. The point stood. Nobody in thousands of years had ever accused him of snoring. 

Her forehead creased in surprise at his vehemence and possibly at the quality of his voice. “You most certainly do. Allergies?” 

It was uncomfortable to breathe through his nose and his chest was tight. It felt vaguely like drowning. 

“I do not have allergies,” he wheezed at her. He ineffectively batted at her hands as she crawled back over to him and pressed the back of her hand to his forehead.

“Shit,” Nue said. “You’re burning up.”

“I do not get sick either,” he told her, just before a wet cough shook his chest. 

“Oh sweet Sylaise,” she said with a tight smile. “I’ll bet you’re a pleasure as a patient.” 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Kinkshame me on Twitter @YTCShepard and on Tumblr @ YoursTrulyCommanderShepard


	3. Chapter 3

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Kiss kiss fall in love

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you to Ember for helping me rhyme "Qarinus"

“It’s because you went out in the rain without a hat on,” Nue told Solas as she supported him against one shoulder. He rode on Vherlen’s back, an arrangement deeply disagreeable to them both. His legs nearly scraped the ground, and the halla had rarely been ridden, much less by an adult man. But Nue had threatened to carry him herself after the first time he fell, and this was the only alternative. 

“That is not how people get sick,” he said, swallowing another coughing fit. His entire body ached like he’d been beaten with a sack of fruit, his head spun wildly, and he could not catch his breath. 

“Oh? I thought you didn’t get sick at all?”

“How _other_ people get sick,” he informed her--his authority somewhat undermined by his streaming nose, wiped every other minute with a rag that had previously contained Vherlen’s hoof care implements. 

“I’ll bite, how do people who are not you get sick?” she asked.

“Creatures too small to see are spread from person to person, or from water or food, and they multiply inside the body. They cause the illness,” Solas informed her, realizing as he spoke that there was no possible way to prove it to her. “That is what...the ancient elves discovered.” 

“Hmm, I will consider the possibility of your tiny invisible spirits, Blue-Eyes. But you definitely need to keep your head covered so that you don’t get not-sick again,” Nue replied with good humor as she scanned the horizon.

He had objected to turning back to the east, overruled by Nue’s better grasp of standing upright and walking in a straight line as well as her logical argument that she knew where shelter might be found along the route she had followed, but could not predict the terrain ahead. 

He had also suggested that she simply leave him in the haystack to recover or die. She had asked whether anyone had ever told him he was cute when he was being nobly self-sacrificing in a tone that suggested her own disagreement with that conclusion. 

So they traveled together at the pace of one overladen and undersized halla past the edge of the cultivated fields flanking the main road and into a line of faintly elevated plateaus ridged in white stone. 

“Limestone,” Nue announced, kicking over a rock. “Maybe a cave nearby, maybe water too.” 

“This entire area was once an inland sea carved by retreating glaciers,” Solas could not resist telling her, his delivery impaired by intervening coughing. “They have mostly evaporated into the small lakes here, but the fossilized remnants of the ancient sea creatures remain in the stones.”

“I can’t wait to hear more about the rocks when you’re better,” Nue told him, checking his temperature again with her cool hand, “but maybe you should save your strength.” 

Solas couldn’t tell whether she was serious or not, because the world kept swimming in his eyes. He thought he was possibly being less than charming, but he lacked the strength for self-reflection. 

They stepped out of a copse of ironwood trees and into a thicker cluster of the short stone plateaus.

Nue helped him off the halla’s back and settled them both down under the largest boughs. The weather remained chancy and overcast that morning, and Solas feared it would rain again soon. 

Nue wrapped both Solas and the halla in the tarp and dispensed food for them both out of her pack. Then she strung her bow and prepared to scout the area. 

“I’m going to find somewhere we can stay long enough for you to get better,” she announced. “Stay put.”

Solas shivered from illness and the implication that she was willing to delay whatever her own journey was for long enough for him to shake off his first brush with mortality. 

“How can you know when or if I will recover?” he asked, wheezing. Irony would demand that he fall prey to an illness unknown in Elvhenan and introduced only by his own mistakes. 

Nue rolled her eyes. “Because you’ve got a cold, Blue-Eyes, not the dragon pox. We’ll rest here a few days, I’ll keep your cup filled, and then you can run away again if you like.” 

The halla, unhappy to be left alone with Solas, staggered to its feet and gave a soft bleat of dissatisfaction until Nue commanded it to sit next to Solas and keep him warm. 

Solas clutched the edges of the oiled canvas around himself, oddly unwilling to see her walk away as well. 

“I apologize,” he blurted out as Nue turned again to go. “I should not have left without saying anything.” 

Her expression softened as she checked the fletching on her arrows. “It’s alright.”

“I did not believe someone would help me for no reason,” he pressed on, forcing the words past his sore throat.

“I know you didn’t. It’s not easy, I’ll bet, living outside of a clan.” Nue uncapped her water skin, pushed it into his hand, and left him with her halla, and Solas could not bring himself to disagree.

* * *

Nue’s expression was cheerful when she returned nearly an hour later. 

“Good campsite, nice spring,” she reported. “Come on.”

Solas managed to walk unassisted with the promise of soon being able to lie down for a few days or perhaps forever, and he followed her through the maze of plateaus until they spotted a shadow in the side of a large overhang that suggested a cave or at least a sizeable depression. 

There were old wheel ruts that spoke to travelers or even aravels using the area, but nothing fresh. Nue whistled tunelessly as he followed her past the entrance and into a cavern illuminated by round holes in the rock where water had dripped through the stone. 

It was not all rock and water, though. Solas stopped at a cluster of ancient and broken bones and thought very hard past the pounding in his head. 

“Be careful,” he said, his whisper somehow loud and echoing in his ears, “there may be bears in here.” 

“Oh?” she responded, not halting their advance.

Solas duly considered the claw marks on the wall as he wavered on his feet. 

“Yes,” he decided. “I believe this is a bear den.” 

“You don’t say.”

Solas frowned, considering the problem. This was the first shelter they’d seen in miles, and the rain could start again at any moment. He was in no real shape to fight, but perhaps they could catch the creature by surprise. 

“They are vulnerable to fire attacks,” he told Nue. “If we see one, stand behind me, and I will cast a fire spell. If the first blast fails to kill it, I will need a moment before I can cast again--perhaps you’ll have time to shoot it.”

“Okay,” she agreed. 

Another dozen paces into the cavern and it widened. A huge slice of rock was collapsed to expose the corner of the cave to the sky, but within it, water flowed down a slope to a rivulet of water, vanishing into the rock. 

A large, furry shape lay in the middle of the cavern. 

“The bear,” Solas breathed, gathering his strength to cast. This distracted him from his continuing and urgent need to lock his knees in order to remain standing, and he would have toppled over if Nue had not grabbed his arm. 

Just before panic gripped him--he was not sure he could cast that fireball spell in his present condition, let alone make the followup cast--he noticed a cluster of three arrows sprouting out of the creature’s neck. It was not moving. The bear was a dead bear. 

Of course Nue had not led him into the bear cavern before remediating the bears. 

“You knew it was already dead,” he accused her.

“You were being so brave, I didn’t want to interrupt,” she giggled. Her halla gave Solas a look that his mind interpreted as long-suffering as it trotted past the bear’s carcass to drink at the small stream. 

“I am going to sleep now. Right here,” he said, sinking to his knees. Perhaps he would wake up and be better. Perhaps he would die in his sleep. Either would be preferable to the events of the past two days. 

“Good choice,” Nue said soothingly. She plucked his bedroll from his pack and spread it on the stone floor of the cavern, then rolled him onto it. Solas wrapped both his arms over his face, trying to remember why he’d ever bothered to wake up in the first place. 

“Get warm and comfortable, and I’ll go fix you a nice cup of willowbark tea as soon as I get a fire going.”

Solas pulled his arms off his face long enough to find hers with his blurry gaze. “I hate tea.”

“I could have guessed,” Nue said, her mouth pulling up at the corner. 

“What?”

She laughed. “You hate everything.” 

Solas felt that was an unfair accusation from someone who had only seen him under very extreme circumstances. There were plenty of things that he enjoyed--they simply could not be found in the Fereldan backwoods. 

Except--

“Not you, Nue,” he slurred, struggling against the pull of unconsciousness. He coughed to keep awake another moment. 

“Hmmm?” she asked, looking up from her tinderbox. 

“I do not...hate _you_ ,” he repeated, feeling very foolish. The room spun.

When she understood, she grinned and leaned over him to cup his cheek with cool and calloused fingers. 

“You’re sweet, Blue-Eyes,” she told him.

* * *

When he next awoke, there was no light save from Nue’s campfire, set between him and the hole in the cavern wall. Nue was awake, stripped to her underclothes, and covered in blood and gore from her wrists to her neck. The bear was in mid-disassembly. 

Solas had seen worse on more than one battlefield, and his empty stomach gave only a mild lurch as he rolled over to his hands and knees to hack more of his lungs into Vherlen’s handkerchief. 

“You were talking in your sleep,” she informed him without ceasing her work. Solas did his best to ignore the meaty sounds coming from her knife. 

Solas tensed. There was little on his mind that he could freely reveal. “What did I say?”

“My Elvish is so bad. It sounded like you were cursing out the gods, but I was a very poor student, so maybe you were saying nice things about Elgar’nan.”

“I...apologize?” Solas said hesitantly, hoping her comprehension was as low as she said and that his intelligibility had been likewise poor. He could hardly afford to antagonize her at this point or to disclose his plans. 

Nue shook her head. “What’s a little blasphemy between friends? If you rave in Elvish, though, my Keeper would love to meet you. She ought to be offended by someone new to spice up her old age.”

Solas did not know how to respond to that, so he remained quiet. 

Nue turned back and studied him. She wiped her face on her shoulder, smearing bear blood on both. “I never thought about a non-Dalish learning so much Elvish, but I suppose you must have scholars too.”

“Very few,” he couldn’t resist telling her. 

“Maybe you can teach me something fun to yell the next time I stub my toe,” she suggested. “Elgar’nan fuck me sideways, something something Mythal’enaste.”

“Did you not listen to your Keeper at all?” he said, swallowing a sputter. 

“I would have listened if she’d taught me swear words. Will you?”

“I will not.” 

“You’re no fun, Blue-Eyes.”

“I am not,” he agreed, even if he privately wished she thought otherwise. 

* * *

He spent at least two days sleeping, sweating, coughing, and drinking Nue’s terrible herbal remedies. Nue had some undertaking with respect to the bear that he dared not interrogate, and he could not focus on much beyond the effort of breathing. 

Even if the entire world burned when he lifted the Veil, the People were sure to thank him if it only meant they would not suffer chest colds again, he told himself. Even if being sick for more than two days meant that Nue sometimes stroked his forehead and sang when she was not curing her new bearhide. 

He made her take it out of the cavern during one period of wakefulness, promising wildly that he would buy her a fur coat made from the creatures of her choice if she would only stop defleshing in the same room where they both slept. She gave him a wounded look when she dragged the tanning rack outside, and he soon regretted his words because it meant that she was not always sitting next to him when he woke up from fever dreams where demons wearing the faces of dead elves reproachfully asked him why he’d condemned them to fall ill and die. 

“Do you have extra salt in your backpack?” she popped her head in to ask him.

Solas rubbed his chest and coughed before he answered. “How much do you need?”

“About one pound of salt per pound of pelt, so...about ten pounds?”

“I did not pack ten extra pounds of salt, no.”

“Pity, we’ll have to leave most of it behind, then,” she replied, preparing to go outside again. 

“Wait,” he called, and he had not tried to sound pitiful, but it emerged that way. His cheeks burned, and he wrapped himself more firmly in the blankets and rolled onto his stomach. 

Nue came and sat down next to him. The space between his shoulderblades itched from his awareness of her presence. He wished she would rest a hand there. 

“Do you need something?” she asked gently, even though she’d left food and water where he could reach them. He heard her uncork the waterskin and pour some of it onto one of her freshly-laundered shirts. She patted the back of his head with her compress. 

“I...no, actually. I will not keep you,” he said unconvincingly. He was tired, but he’d slept so much over the past two days that his body refused to cooperate. He closed his eyes nonetheless, head pillowed on his crossed arms and face turned towards Nue. 

“Do you want me to recite some poetry for you? That always puts me right to sleep,” she offered. 

“Ma nuvenin,” he replied after a moment, wondering whether he was about to hear the Fall of the Dales in heroic couplets or a morality play about Arlathan that he would find personally offensive. It could not be worse than the things people had said about him in the past. He hid his face under his bicep to conceal his expression. 

“Alright, get comfortable,” Nue told him, running her cold compress again across the back of his neck. “This one was my favorite as a child. Ready? ‘There once was a lad from Qarinus, who was known for behavior libidinous…’”

It hurt his chest to laugh, and he wondered deliriously whether that was what falling in love felt like. 

* * *

“Do you _want_ to learn more Elvish?” Solas felt particularly useless when he awoke to discover that Nue had excavated a hollow in the small stream running through the cavern large enough to use as a washing basin (“In Kirkwall, they call this a ‘whore’s bath,’” she told him conspiratorially.) 

Solas got the sense that idleness was nearly painful for her, and every time he opened his eyes, she was attending to some ineffable task. Her own language was all he was in a position to offer her. 

“Aside from the exciting parts, which you clearly know but will not share with me?” she replied, her expression teasing. Nue’s hair had been washed and combed out to dry while he slept, and now she was mending a pile of clothes and gear, including some portion of the bear pelt. 

“Yes, aside from those,” he said, privately thinking that it would not be really objectionable to teach her the rest under the right circumstances. Not the present ones, where he was attempting to get clean without getting completely naked, even though (or especially because) Nue had taken her own trousers off to re-sew a seam. 

His fever had broken, Nue declared, which meant that they could move on when Solas felt up to it. He was oddly reluctant to leave, likely owing to the remaining coughing spasms, which Nue predicted would last him several weeks. 

“I suppose?” Nue said, head cocked thoughtfully. “Like I said, I was bad at it. I didn’t like sitting still.” 

“Though we will soon be moving on,” Solas pointed out, tensing as he realized that she might not particularly wish to travel with him once they struck camp, even if they were headed in the same direction. 

“Just a little bit longer, I want to finish before we go,” she solemnly told him, shaking the pile of fur in her lap. “I’m not ready yet.

“I will write out all the verb conjugations for you,” he declared, pulling his clothing back on as unobtrusively as he could and then rummaging in his backpack until he found his sketchbook at the base. He flipped through it to ensure that nothing incriminating was within--he did not think he would have been indiscreet, but he found it hard to remember what he’d done in the past few months. But there were only a few sketches of ruins and runes, plus a bird or two, none of which would mean anything to her. 

Solas took a seat on his bedroll, sharpened his charcoal pencil, and carefully wrote in standardized Elvish script:

_I speak Elvish._

_You speak Elvish._

_We speak Elvish._

Nue put her fur down and peered over his shoulder. 

“Really?” she said, reaching over to trace the paper with a fingertip. “You’re going to write this all out for me?” Her voice was a little uncertain, and Solas looked up sharply.

“Yes?” He turned to meet her eyes for the question. 

“Even our Keeper can’t really read Elvish.” 

He might have guessed that. Nue looked up at the ceiling, her face in a rarely serious set. “I didn’t think I’d come home with anything useful, and I…” she shook her head, words falling away. “Thank you. It means a lot.” 

Something about her words made his heart pound, and perhaps it was the idea that there was a Dalish clan in all of Thedas that might appreciate what he had to offer. 

Of course, they’d all benefit, after the Veil was gone, and the People who still slept would all be abroad to reteach their lost cultural patrimony, but…

“Are you on your way home, then?” Solas asked. He wasn’t aware of a Dalish clan nearby, but he did not know of them all.

“Not yet,” she said wistfully. 

His immediate satisfaction at that answer was disquieting. 

* * *

Solas slept well enough that night to acquaint himself with the Fade in the area and reorient himself to both his destination and the surroundings. He thought he had a good enough grasp on the journey ahead that he might coax Nue to remain at his side for yet another week or more, the time after which he simply decided to not consider. 

They packed up their scant belongings on Vherlen, who had exhausted the best plants within a short distance around their little cavern and was seemingly happy to move on. Nue confidently predicted good weather for the next few days of travel, but colder winds as autumn pressed on towards winter. Neither had spoken of their ultimate destinations, nor when they might part ways. 

Solas had never thought that he might fondly regard a pile of limestone rocks, but he hesitated as he stood under the lip of the plateau, ready to leave them behind. He wondered what spirits might reenact his illness, and he did not think all of them were of the darker variety. 

Nue let her halla lead, but waited at Solas’ side for him to take the first step back to the road. She had braided her hair into two plaits, one fluffed over each ear, as well as braided up the laces of her jacket. She fussed at Solas until he did the same, even though they were bound to overheat as they walked down the road in the bright sun.

“I have something for you,” she unexpectedly pronounced, retrieving the pile of bear fur she’d been sewing during Solas’ convalescence. 

His lips compressed as he wondered how he could possibly demur when she had spent days on the project. He rifled through memories of Mythal’s court for some method of gracefully rejecting a gift. 

“Look, it’s a hat,” she told him as he stared at her, plopping the ridiculous thing on her own head to show him. It had long side flaps that would tie under the wearer’s chin and folds of fur sewn into the shape of small, round ears on the top. She grinned broadly at him--hours of work had gone into this payoff. “To keep your head warm, since you don’t have…”

Before she could directly explain the relationship between his shaven head and her gift, Solas cut her off. 

He grabbed the golden ends of her dangling braids and yanked her closer to him. 

As he slanted his lips across the curve of her laughing mouth, he realized he was smiling too. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Kinkshame me on Twitter @YTCShepard and Tumblr @ YoursTrulyCommanderShepard


	4. Chapter 4

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> "In my defense I have none."

He should not have done it. 

Even setting aside the wisdom of further entangling his path with hers, for the moment--and Solas set that very firmly aside--there was no reason for him to repay her assistance by kissing her when she had given no indication that she would welcome that kind of attention. 

If others had generally sought his attentions in Elvhenan, Solas thought that had as much to do with the attraction of his power as that of his person--and both were much diminished after thousands of years of sleep, anyway. Nue could not think very highly of either, after what she’d seen of him. 

_She kissed you back, though,_ went a different thought, in the voice of a much younger elf, one who had only needed to be concerned with who he wanted to be kissing, not who wanted to be kissed. _You might consider her tongue in your mouth to be her statement on the subject._

Solas brooded on it as he followed Nue to the west, though her steps took them on no defined trail. They would move well past the human settlement they had recently divested of its inn before they dared the main road again.

Despite the warren of limestone outcroppings, it was not difficult country, and the weather had shifted to that golden fall light that grows brighter and suffuses the air even as the days contract. Solas trusted her to set the pace and choose the direction, even if they had not come to any agreement on their destination. He let his feet drag as he enjoyed the sun on his shoulders and the sight of Nue’s swinging braids in front of him. 

Nue didn’t walk in anything like a straight line, anyway. She was always dashing off to the side to collect tiny treasures that caught her eye: berry bushes, a patch of red clover, which she threatened to make into tea, and once a rusted silverite torque covered in dirt.

“Avvar,” she said, tossing it back. “But you never know.” 

She did not wear jewelry--not in her earlobes or around her neck--but Solas wondered if she would keep a piece from Elvhenan, if she found one. If he did. 

When the sun crossed overhead to angle into their eyes, Nue called a halt in a grove of gnarled, ancient oaks. She pulled her bow out of her pack and asked him, with a self-deprecating grin, what he wanted for dinner.

“You can have anything you like as long as you’ve seen it startle out of the bushes in the past hour,” she informed him. She had a twist to her lips that told him she understood the odd domesticity of it. She’d seen him stripped to the very basest state of his life in a way that people who had known him for ages could not claim. Like Felassan, who’d never seen him trip over his own trousers because he got dizzy dressing after bathing in a frigid stream. Did she think he was just a man? He was, under everything else. 

“I defer to the chef’s choice,” Solas replied, thinking that it was unlikely that a dressed rack of lamb en croute had recently fled their approach. Nue vanished into the woods as Solas made camp. 

It did not take long for her to return with two luckless grouse, and Solas, feeling unhelpful, levitated a log closer to their campfire to provide a seat as she cooked their dinner. 

It was the greatest expenditure of arcane energy she’d yet seen him perform, and she startled to see it float in. 

“Could your Keeper not accomplish this?” he asked, observing her expression.

“I’m sure she could,” Nue said, bemused but taking a seat regardless. “But she wouldn’t--there’s always the worry Templars or an informer will see one of us use magic and we’ll bring them down on the entire clan. We can’t afford to be casual about it.” 

That was enough to sour his mood again--another reminder of all they’d lost. Even the few still able to connect to the Fade did not much dare to. How long before the Andrastrian fear of magic set in among the Dalish as well? He needed to act soon to restore the Fade’s place at the heart of the world, if any of the quicklings whether human or elven might expect to adapt to the fall of the Veil. 

Later that night, Solas lay on his bedroll by the fire, his head propped on his hand. His strength was still returning, and even though he thought Nue had surreptitiously slowed and delayed their trek so that they had done less than a full day’s march, he was tired. Fatigue pulled at his eyelids as he watched Nue. 

“The People used their magic like a second set of hands, once,” he told Nue. She sat a few paces away, looking at his sketchbook. Studying Elvish, perhaps. The firelight clung to the round curve of her cheek and gilded the edge of one of her long braids as she flipped the pages. “It was in every one of their thoughts and deeds. Have you ever considered it? What it would have been like to be able to touch the Fade the way a mage does?”

Nue gave a half-hearted hum as though she were not really listening to him. Her tongue poked her cheek out as she traced a shape with one fingertip. 

She turned to show him the page: a detail of a buttress that had caught his eye, the carving of the stone as it fit to a ruined wall. 

“I’ve never seen anything like this,” she said. “Do you remember where this was?” 

He did, but the place was now full of his agents. 

“Some places I have visited only in the Fade,” he said, an oblique deflection. “And some sketches are only from memory--the memories of others, still preserved there.” 

Nue sighed over the little picture before carefully turning the page.

“I thought I might follow June’s path, once, instead of Andruil’s, but I always lacked the patience to make anything beautiful.” She cocked her head at him as though imagining the stripes of the Dalish crafter-god across his forehead. Solas shuddered. 

As if the old pervert had anything to do with either Solas’ skill or even Dalish craftsmanship. 

“Do you not need patience on the hunt?” Solas asked, at a loss for anything supportive to say.

“Oh, you haven’t seen me do it. I’m not one of those people who sits in the bushes and waits for the deer to wander by. I just run until something else runs away a little slower than me,” she told him with a wink. “Nothing like what it takes to draw like this.” 

She turned another page. “Or to find Elven temples in the Fade. My Keeper would sell an aravel to see this one.” She bent down closer, as if she’d be able to glean more details from his charcoal scribbles with her nose closer to the paper. 

“There’s one a few days away,” he said impulsively, even though he had not planned to mention it. “Dedicated to June, in fact. To the south, however…”

He had time. Felassan would wait. His agents would wait. The People had waited three thousand years and could wait a few days longer. 

Nue’s eyes widened. She sunk her teeth into the side of her lower lip as she thought about it. “I--yes, I think I can. You’re sure? Clan Alerion didn’t know anything about a temple along this country.” 

Solas tucked the name of the nearest Dalish clan--one that Nue did not belong to--away for later use, but nodded. “I have seen the dreams of the Alamarri when they explored this area, and it was still there.” 

She shook her head in wonder, braids swinging. “I ought to turn around and bring you back to my Keeper,” she said. “She would know the questions to ask you, what to look for. I wish you could meet her. You could. You could--” she trailed off when she saw his expression. 

Her own turned knowing, and a little sad. 

She stowed his sketchpad back in her saddlebag and stood. She had not hung up her hammock yet, and Solas was struck with the realization that she had been sleeping on the stone floor of the cavern for his sake, rather than suspended in her comfortable bed. 

But instead of attending to that, she crossed to his own bedroll and slowly knelt, then lay down on the very edge of his blankets, an arm’s-length away from him. Her gaze ticked around his expression. 

“It was an offer, not an obligation, you know,” she said in a softer voice. 

“I know,” he said, even if he was not sure about that. It felt too heavy, this thought that one woman, perhaps one clan of Dalish elves living in an unnamed forest he knew not where, would hold open a space for him. Heavier than he had the strength to carry, among all his other burdens. 

He tensed when Nue shifted closer to him, feeling trapped by the unlooked-for choices before him. She lifted a thumb to the center of his forehead, softly worrying at the line between his brows until he closed his eyes and leaned into her touch. 

Why shouldn’t he have this, though? Why couldn’t he have her lips pressing at the line of his jaw, the tip of her nose against his cheek? For this stretch of space and time, he was as free to accept care as any other man in the world would be. His past and future were irrelevant to the stretch of road to the west to be traveled. 

He wrapped both arms around her waist as sleep claimed him, and he imagined that Nue’s dreams would feel like an endless summer day if he ever touched them. 

* * *

The shrine to June was carved into the cliff face, but not visible from the rocks below. To enter, one had to first descend among a number of boulders at the base of the escarpment to find the concealed entrance to stairs wrought out of the living stone. Up hundreds of yards, the stairs terminated in a honeycomb of chambers facing out to the open air and the steep drop. 

June had made an entrance in draconic form to commence the festivities, and hundreds of Elvhen had toasted him with wines never tasted since. His gardeners had coaxed flowering vines to trail up the walls and perfume the air with their petals. Now the great ballroom was stripped and weatherbeaten down to the rock, echoing empty. 

“How would anyone ever find this place?” Nue asked, not at all winded from their climb. 

_I received a written invitation to attend a week-long party as a guest of Ghilan’nain; I came via eluvian but left before the orgy started._

“I saw it in the Fade. Places such as this, which were the site of...strong emotions...draw spirits who seek to recreate the events that occurred,” he replied. 

The eluvian was shattered. It might not even have lasted past the end of the empire. Solas marked the empty frame in the corner of the room. 

“‘Strong emotions,’ huh? What was this used for?” Nue asked, spinning around the room. The enamel was still visible at corners of the vaulted ceiling, but the elements had quickly stripped off the silk wall coverings. All the wooden furniture had long since crumbled to dust, even the gilding carried away by crows and magpies. The stone mosaics on the floor were the best preserved, but showed no more than vaguely organic forms in the tiles. 

“I am not sure,” he replied (which was true, who knew what June had used the space for after the party was over), “but I believe this was at one time a space for dancing. Like a ballroom.” 

Nue tipped her head back, delighted, as she tried to imagine it. She slowly twirled, going up on her toes. 

“Were there chandeliers? Candles?” she asked. “What did they do at night?” 

Solas came up behind her and caught her by the elbow. He turned her until she looked out past the ledge, to the northern horizon. He wrapped one arm around her until his chin rested on her shoulder and his palm rested against her stomach. 

He had danced in this room, with anyone who asked. He’d thought of nothing but Mythal’s power, his own standing. He had to work to retrieve the room from his memory, as he had not cared to dwell on the surroundings at the time. 

“You would have seen the stars in the northern sky as soon as the sun set,” he told her. “There would have been little runes set in the ceiling to match them, to bring the night sky in.” He remembered that much, at least. The uninterrupted sweep of midnight and gold above the revelers. 

Nue put her head back on his shoulder, looking up as though she could summon the memory herself. 

He tried to imagine Nue in that long ago ballroom, among the dancers. Mentally dressed her in robes of green--no, blue, to bring out the glints in her hair--and set her among the nobles of the Elvhen. It was easy to imagine her moving through the steps, because she was graceful and strong in a way that many Elvhen had not bothered to be. He would have noticed her in any Age, he thought. 

Though anyone in vallaslin would have been out of sight, down in the kitchens. 

And even if her face had been bare, he could not imagine that Nue would have danced while slaves worked in the rooms below, and he let his arms fall from around her. She did not notice his sour thought, and she innocently twirled to take in the exits to the room.

“Can I see the rest? Is it safe?” she asked, her face alight with glee.

“I cannot vouch for the lack of bears, but there are no magical traps or impediments,” he told her, and she scampered off towards the ancient stairs to the dining room. 

“Wait,” he called to her, seeing an iron bracket still set in the wall. He could not resist showing off a little as he approached it and called forth veilfire with a flourish of his wrist. 

He pulled the ancient torch from its holster and passed it to her. 

“The light of the Elvhen,” he explained. 

She bussed his cheek, grinning, before running off with it. 

It was with mingled pain and pleasure that he watched her enjoy the ruins. So little was left, to be still more than the Dalish had. 

Solas picked more slowly through the salons to the rear of the complex. So far from the landing, they contained more debris of the past. Most of it fell to dust as he approached, but there were bits of trash left behind by long-gone guests. He wondered whether Nue might care for an empty perfume bottle or the silver bracket of the shelf that had suspended it. 

He dropped both when he heard her wordless shout from the direction of the baths, and he broke into a jog, unable to tell what emotion animated her voice. 

He skidded to a halt at the entrance to the chamber--both because Nue’s helpless giggles had calmed his panic, and because he got his first glimpse of what had caused her to yell.

He had not had occasion to visit the baths, thousands of years before. He had not spent the night, preferring to use the eluvian in the main hall to seek his own bed before returning for the next day’s revels. The baths were dry now that the spells that had drawn water from deep beneath the plateau had failed. The wide, rectangular pools were empty, and the stone benches no longer held baskets of towels and cosmetics. The edges of the hot pools would once have been covered by cultivated moss to cushion bathers as they soaked their feet, and were now exposed white marble. 

But the space otherwise remained as the Elvhen had left it--murals painted on the walls, mosaics covering the floor and ceiling.

Pornographic ones. 

Elves fucked in vivid pigment and shining ceramic. Across every flat space in the large chamber, elves fucked in every position an immortal people had ever invented, and a few they’d learned from spirits. In knots of two, and three, and more. With no equipment but what nature granted or with implements known to every people, or with devices lost to time. The artistic skill of execution was no better than mediocre. The persons depicted, however, looked to be having an absolutely fantastic time. 

“I don’t need to ask what this room was for,” Nue said through her folded fingers, pressed firmly over her mouth. 

Solas’ mouth had dropped open as he took it in. He wasn’t surprised, necessarily, to see it in a room June had decorated, but…

“I did not know about this,” he mumbled, his cheeks going red. 

Nue howled with laughter. She laughed until tears rolled down her face, staggering over to him to grab him by the shoulder and wipe her face on his throat. 

Solas curled his hands into fists and thought very hard about the equations that converted the Fade into heat and kinetic energy. He stared at the ceiling until he realized that his gaze was directly on the flexing buttocks of an elf that too closely resembled the party’s host. 

Nue’s body shook with mirth, and she dug her fingers into his arm when she finally managed to calm herself. 

Solas would have suggested that they review the eluvian chamber instead, but Nue backed away with a gleeful expression still on her face. 

“I can’t believe those spirits failed to mention the fuck room,” she said, and the obscenity in her mouth made a shot of heat go straight to his cock. “All those strong emotions, and you never saw them reenact _this_?”

Solas could not summon words. Words escaped him. 

She folded her hands behind her back like an art critic and began to peruse the murals. Solas dug his fingernails into his palms.

She hooked a thumb at a particularly filthy depiction of a man attempting to please two women at the same time--and doing a creditable job of it, if their faces were any proof--and grinned at him. “You’ve never seen _this_ in the Fade.” She rolled her shoulders back in a tiny challenge. 

“I did not say that,” Solas could not help but respond. Technically, the Fade had been _everywhere_ , once, and he--

He’d been younger, once, too. 

Nue raised her eyebrows at him, impressed. “Wow,” she said, drawling the word out until it had two distinct syllables dripping off her lips. She lifted her torch to get a better look at the center of the action, and Solas coverly adjusted his waistband. 

She moved on down the mural, stopping at the next tangle of bodies. Elven hands clenched on elven bodies, hair tangling around faces and hands. 

“And this one?” she asked, looking back at him again. 

“...that one too,” he admitted. 

Her lower lip twitched, as though she were biting back her thoughts on that. He wished she wouldn’t. Her expression was that of a woman whose mind was abruptly full of good ideas. 

She rolled her neck to take in a scene that sprawled across several couches, connected by a web of ropes and leashes. She pointed at it, and mouthed the words, ‘that one?’

Solas nodded. That one too. 

She shook her head in admiration and moved on.

Finally, she came to a couple, one man, one woman, twined around each other. The position was athletic, to say the least, but physically possible. Solas thought so, anyway. It had been a very long time since he’d been that young. The woman’s head was tossed back in ecstasy, and the artist had taken some care with the press of the man’s fingers into her thighs.

Nue wordlessly pointed at it, her eyes asking him the question. That one? And--

It had been ages, but Solas would need to sleep for more than ten thousand years to forget what that particular question looked like on a woman’s face. Would have to be dead before he forgot that one. 

“Yes,” he said gravely, his heart kicking into a sprint and a wash of sensation flushing his neck and chest at the thought of it. 

Nue smiled, the corners of her mouth pulling up so broadly that her eyes creased at the corners.

“Wo-w,” she drawled. 

* * *

He took her seriously but not literally, which was a mistake. He thought he might bend her over one of the benches, scrape his teeth across the knobs of her spine. Or hoist her up against the wall of the room to feel her heels digging into his ass every time he thrust into her. 

Instead he found himself pressed up against the wall, Nue’s palms splayed alongside his head and her hip hitched up against his cock, rock-hard and trapped in his trousers. Her tongue again in his mouth, sweeping against the inside of his lower lip. 

Solas twisted his hips in a throw he thought would switch their positions and afford him more control of the situation. Nue didn’t budge, instead shifting against him in a sinuous stroke that had him gasping into her mouth. 

She took pity on him and began to strip off her clothing with cheerful abandon. Solas tried to help, mostly catching small touches of exposed skin against the sides of his fingers. Women in Elvhenan had worn clothing with latches and hooks and bows, all of which he’d been reasonably adept at undoing, but he was stymied by the fabric Nue wore wrapped around her body. She plucked out one loose end, put it in his hand, then spun like a dancer, unwinding like a top. 

He couldn’t recall feeling so glad to see a woman’s bare breasts. Could barely recall feeling. And this _felt._

Hers were small and pointed, mostly dark brown nipples for him to catch in his mouth as she wiggled out of her trousers. Her skin was satin against his tongue. He could feel her heartbeat against his lips. The raspy sound of her breathing in his mouth. He rolled his thumbs over her hip bones, appreciating the warmth of her body under his hands. 

“That one,” Nue reminded him, tugging on his collar--he still hadn’t managed to get any of his own clothing off--and pointing at the last mural they’d reviewed. Her selection off the menu of Elvhen decadence. 

Her face showed no doubt that he’d indulge her. And he would. He dragged his chin down the center line of her body, pausing with his forehead against the soft swell of her lower belly just to draw the moment out. Her breath hitched in anticipation. 

She was tall enough that he had to kneel over his heels for this. To hook one of her thighs over his shoulder and press his entire face between her legs. He heard the slap of her palms against the wall as she balanced herself, the muscles in both thighs going taut

She took a deep shuddering breath, and then began to offer a stream of suggestions so filthy that he nearly pulled his face away to look up at her in wonder. Her instructions were so exacting as to how he ought to lick her cunt and then fuck her thereafter that he nearly stopped to tell her that he was older than her and he knew how to pleasure a woman, actually--but as a man who did _not_ know would probably say the same, he kept his mouth focused on stroking through her folds and then sucking, gently, on her clit when he found it with his lips. 

And he did know. 

How to make her breath stutter. How to make her grind her body against his chin. How to make the muscles of her stomach vibrate as her climax twisted into readiness in her core. 

Her hips were drawn and tight under his hands, trembling on the verge. Solas looked up the long line of her stomach and told her, in rigorously-articulated Elvish, “ _come on my face_.” 

If she hadn’t known it before, she’d remember one obscene Elvish phrase now, he thought, even if she was not crying out in words any longer, just falling apart in his hands. 

Never let the Dalish say he’d done nothing for them. 

Nue sank down to his level then, grasping his face in her hands and kissing him all over his wet mouth and chin. 

“Are you alright?” she asked between kisses. “You’re breathing hard. I didn’t keep you alive for weeks just to kill you like this.”

Solas didn’t think he was in any danger, but of all the things that might have or might yet kill him, he thought Nue’s muscular thighs around his face was the way he wanted to go. 

“Perfect,” he groaned into her mouth, dragging his hands down her back to dig his fingers into the round swell of her ass. 

He pulled her into his lap, thinking again that he might roll them over. Shame about the stone floor, but Nue’s body was hot and flushed. Besides, he had the vague feeling that matters would be quick. He thought that if Nue did not stop rocking against him that he might embarrass them both, and tumbling over onto her was a sure diversion. 

But Nue murmured, “I’ve got you,” and began to pull his clothing apart. There was nothing he could do from that position--his back against the wall, his legs splayed out in front of him--save run his hands across her body to distract her. Nue was still doing all the work. 

She preened under his touch even as she deftly got his trousers undone. He made another feint to move--stand, roll, something--but Nue pressed his shoulder back against the wall with one palm and used the other to circle the base of his cock. 

He sucked in a deep breath and held it as Nue flexed her thighs to lift herself over the tip of his cock and slowly, painstakingly slowly, lower herself onto it. 

He couldn’t watch her taking the last inches without disgracing himself, so he buried his face against her collarbone. 

She swiveled her hips until they lay flush against his own, as close as two bodies could be to each other. Her cunt was slick and hot around him, and her arms were heavy where they were looped over his shoulders. It felt. It felt. 

Nue tipped his head back to kiss him as she gave a first, experimental rock of her hips. 

“Okay?” she asked softly. 

Solas nodded. An unexpected shudder ran through him. Nue shushed him as she gently slid up his cock and pressed herself down. 

He ought to do something. Press his hand between their bodies. Take her breast back into his mouth. But Nue’s slow rhythm had him overcome. His head fell back against the wall so that he could watch the sway of her hips, the jerk of his own when her body tightened around him on the upstroke. 

“I’ve got you, I’ve got you,” she murmured. 

Solas was struck by the brief, rueful thought that same spirits that observed June’s excesses thousands of years before would now see Solas topped by a Dalish woman whose name he still did not know, would watch his heels scrape the stone floor of the bath chamber as he writhed beneath her. 

He came with his eyes open and fixed on her face. She looked like an Andrastrian’s idea of an angel, her lower lip sweetly rounded and her cheeks flushed pink. He couldn’t remember wanting another woman the way he wanted her. Couldn’t remember wanting, except for her. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I told BeauBeau that I was going to create an AU that was so self-indulgent...
> 
> Kinkshame me on Twitter @YTCShepard and on Tumblr @ YoursTrulyCommanderShepard


	5. Chapter 5

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> If you think you saw me add a chapter...
> 
> ¯\\_(ツ)_/¯
> 
> This one gave me fits until I did.

“You hear two different things about the Circles,” Nue mused. She lay carelessly nude on their spread blankets, even though their skin had long since dried in the cool, dry autumn breeze. Solas, wearing more clothing, had his head propped on one hand and scratched the gap between Nue’s shoulder blades with the other. 

He thought he’d finally managed to impress her when he drew on the water deep below the cliffs and brought it through ancient pipes to fill the baths. Most of the runes could still be activated, and he’d thereby conjured his first hot bath in weeks. Nue had been delighted, diving between the hot and tepid pools like an otter. She soaked herself until she was quite pink and her hair curled up around her face like an aureole. Now Solas was distracted by the appealing movement of her muscles down her bare back and the feel of them under his fingertips, but he belatedly hummed to indicate that he was listening. 

“One, that the Circle is basically a jail for mages, and they’re locked up alone in their cells until they go mad.” Nue held up two fingers in front of her face. “The second, that those mages get up to every kind of depravity behind closed doors--demon summoning, blood magic, and of course, lots and lots of very inventive sex.” She waggled her eyebrows at him. “I always preferred the second story, of course, but I can’t tell you how pleased I am that it is true.” 

Solas supposed there was the kernel of a compliment to his sexual prowess somewhere in her theory (although he’d done little he considered notable in that arena so far), but after a hesitation, he disabused her of the notion that he’d come from a Circle. 

“I have been fortunate enough to evade the Templars,” he told her. “With any luck, they will all fall soon. I did not live in a Circle.” 

Nue turned her head to look up at him and pursed her lips. He saw her mind work as she reconsidered. “Oh? There’s a way the People look, when they come from the city,” she said. “They make themselves look smaller. Like they’re afraid to take up the space. Shoulders hunched.” 

Solas slowly withdrew his hand from her back. “And I looked humble and meek to you?”

Nue looked back only for a flash. “As much as a wolf looks like a dog. You didn’t look at all like the fla--city elves. That’s why I thought you had to come from a Circle. I supposed people who could set things on fire with their minds didn’t need to fear the shems either.” 

Solas feared the next set of questions instead. Nue studied him, attempting to place him within her limited Dalish understanding of the shape of the world. She would fail, necessarily. There was no way for her to understand.

If she came to conclusions, she did not voice them. 

“It’s not your fault if I made assumptions,” she said, with a little self-deprecation. “You never said that’s what you were. When we heard about what happened at Kirkwall, the hahrens decided we would take in any of the People who escaped the Circles. It’s the reason I followed you in the first place.”

The Dalish had probably thought that was kind.

“So the escaping mages can live in the woods and be hunted for their race, rather than just their magic?” Solas asked. 

Nue’s brow twitched. “I haven’t seen you complaining about eating well and sleeping safely,” she retorted. 

Solas thought that, actually, he’d done a fair amount of complaining, and Nue knew that. 

“The Dalish are not safe,” Solas said. “And they are not well. The People are safe nowhere in Thedas, not least in your Dalish clans. The Dalish solution is no better than that of the People confined in alienages or locked in Circles. They live short lives of no lasting import, wondering the entire time how it is they fell from ruling an empire to starving in the streets or the woods.” 

He probably ought not to have said so much, he immediately reflected. Or have sounded so angry. It was not Nue’s fault. It was his. 

Nue rolled over, and he wished she’d put some clothes on before the conversation. She didn’t seem angry, at least. 

“We’re not living in the woods because we think the trees are so lovely, or eating squirrels because they’re tastier than chicken,” Nue said, as though explaining to a child. “We’re preserving what we can of our heritage, because someday things will be better.”

“How?” Solas asked, exasperated. “What are you doing to make things better?” 

Nue smiled at him and reached up to trace the dimple in his chin with a thumb. His question did not press her in the least. “Keeping each other alive the best we can, because we don’t have anything if we don’t have our people. What’s _your_ plan, Blue-Eyes?” 

And oh, he nearly opened his mouth to tell her. Some of it. A little of it. His mind couldn’t turn the possibilities quickly enough. He hesitated, desperate to unburden himself of at least a fraction of it, but he waited too long, and Nue took his silence for a concession. She was gentle in her victory, though. She reached for the edge of the blanket and wrapped it around the both of them, rolling up against his chest.

“You deserve better than this,” Solas finally said. “Better than simply surviving. Everything the people who built this temple had and more. I want...us to have that.” He elided the word ‘you’ at the last moment, but upon consideration, he realized he might have promised still more than he had intended. 

That made her smile. “Do you have a family? People?” she asked gently, ducking her head under his chin. 

“No family,” he said after he thought about it. “But people...yes, I do.” 

“They’re lucky to have you,” Nue said, her voice growing thick with sleep. 

But all Solas could feel was jealous for the Dalish, who had her, instead.

* * *

“Honnleath,” Nue said, pointing at a faint wisp of smoke curling over the trees. It had not been quite clear who was following whom, the past several days, for they had moved toward the town without explicitly agreeing to do so. It was a natural destination; it was situated at the eastward terminus of the most reliable pass through the Frostbacks for several hundred miles. 

Solas had already planned to stop in Honnleath. Honnleath was strategic. He had several agents there, although none of them were aware of the others. Two of them had even met him before in their dreams--in his form as the giant, six-eyed wolf of Dalish legend. They reported on traffic through the pass and the doings of the Mage Underground, who maintained their own unsubtle base of operations in the area. It was easy enough to instruct them that a high-ranking agent for the brewing elven rebellion would be passing through. 

Nue and Solas drew close enough to the road to see the wooden palisade around the outskirts of the town. Nue gnawed the inside of her cheek as she considered it. 

“The People often work as ostlers in these big towns,” Nue told him, as though she were quite the cosmopolitan and Honnleath were not a middling provincial cluster of only a couple thousand beings. “Stay here, and I’ll go see if they’ll let us sleep in the stables.” She apparently considered the opportunity to be quite the treat. 

“All right,” Solas agreed, curious to see what Nue would manage on her own this time, even though he had no intention of sleeping with the horses, who were not even as clean as the halla. He supposed that if Nue were to get in another scrap, he’d be able to call for assistance in setting the place on fire this second time. Nue left Vherlen with Solas and cautiously proceeded through the town gates. 

Some better part of an hour later, she returned, smiling broadly. 

“Good luck,” she reported. “The shem who owns the inn has been called up with his lord to go north to...well, he’s not there, and his staff are all elves. We can sleep in the stable, buy supplies, whatever we need. The chef’s a bit up on himself, but one of the spit-boys said we can come in for dinner. It’s some kind of shem holiday.” 

“Well done,” Solas responded, honestly pleased with her. A small, seductive kind of a thought had begun to weave its way through the back of his mind. The thought whispered that there was no reason that Nue’s road needed to diverge from his at all once he crossed into Orlais. That he might keep a lover as he worked to rearrange the nature of the world. Why not? The dynamics inherent in command had made any kind of intimacy impossible during his last rebellion, but Nue had no power to oppose him or reason to betray him. He might nudge her into working with his cause in the gentlest way possible, but keep her near regardless. If she had liked the ruins of June’s temple, he could expect that she would be enthralled by what remained in the Crossroads. She might easily pass the next few months assisting him in mapping the remaining routes, and shelter there from the fall of the Veil alongside the rest of his people. 

They entered the town together, alongside the halla, enduring nothing worse than a few curious stares. The town was not large enough to contain an alienage, but Solas saw more than a few of the People working around the town. Many were setting up long tables and booths around the central square in the town. 

Doing the math in his head, Solas was surprised to realize that it must be the first day of Satinalia, and the Andrastrians would be preparing to celebrate. The inn stood at the southern edge of the square, with the stables running perpendicular to the main road. A redheaded stableboy waved at Nue as they approached, jogging out to meet her.

“There she is. I’ve never seen a tame one,” he remarked as he approached Vherlen. “They’re beautiful!” His appreciative smile took in both the halla and the woman, but Solas dismissed the boy and his simpering. The lad was scarcely more than a child, even if he thought that a few minutes conversation with Nue made them friends. 

“Is the head ostler here?” Solas asked him, casually resting his fingertips against the curve of Nue’s lower back. She startled in surprise. 

“Dunno,” the stableboy said, sizing Solas up. “He won’t mind if I let you stay, though. Everyone will be fairly legless tonight. Won’t notice any extras in the hay.” The boy turned back to Nue. “You’ll have to come out though--we’ll be drinking up all last year’s wine, and there will be music, dancing, even a juggler!”

The invitation rather pointedly did not include Solas, but before Solas could indicate that they would pass, Nue enthusiastically told the boy that they would love to attend the Satinalia festivities. 

The stableboy shot Solas a triumphant look and began to pepper Nue with a stream of very unnecessary questions about halla care. Solas looked over his head and off to the stables. An older man was watching them. Solas decided to let a little of his mask drop. He drew up to his full height and crossed his arms on his chest. 

“You should call over the head ostler now,” he said in a voice that dripped with the authority that had once commanded armies. As the boy watched them, Solas drew deep on the power of the Fade, just holding it. Even though no other mages were present, Solas knew that the elf would feel the subtle changes in the energies of the world. 

The boy blinked, abruptly uncertain. 

Solas made eye contact with the grey-haired elf, who slowly approached them. People could look very different in the waking world than they did in the Fade, but Solas thought this was his contact. A bit older and thinner than he imagined himself when speaking to Fen’Harel. 

“Voris,” said the ostler to the stableboy, his voice stern, “go inside and tell Dannatha that we have guests for the inn.” 

The stableboy twisted his head to stare in surprise. “But, they’re…” 

The ostler cuffed the lad lightly across the side of the head, little white lines forming beside his nose. “You heard me. Take the lady’s halla to the loose box, and treat it gently, for the sake of your life.” 

Nue’s eyebrows climbed toward her hairline, but she said nothing, looking at Solas for his cue. He nodded gravely, and Voris the stableboy laid a hand on the back of the halla’s neck and urged it after him with the lure of a cube of sugar out of his pocket. He looked back at Solas, his face mystified and more than a little fearful.

The ostler then took in both Solas and Nue with a quick bob of his head. 

“Messere,” he said to Solas with a hint of a stutter. He did not know how to address him. “I can have a room set aside for you and your wife.” 

Solas supposed that being instructed by a giant wolf in his dreams that he might be expected to provide service was different from discovering that his dreams were actually _true_. 

Solas felt Nue jolt beneath his hand. He belatedly processed the ostler’s assumption about his relationship with the Dalish woman. 

“I--” Solas opened his mouth to correct him, but Nue beat him to it. 

“That’s very kind of you,” she said, smiling brightly at the man. “We’ve traveled a long way.” 

The man was no more immune to Nue’s charm--and she did look very charming, with the sun shining on her hair and the cool wind chapping her cheeks--than his employee. The man blinked at her, a little dazed, but his fear seemed to settle under her smile. 

The look that Nue shot Solas once the man was gone was more troublesome. 

* * *

Inside the inn, Dannatha, a housemaid of about Nue’s age, was cautious about leading the two elves up the stairs. She deferred to Voris’ authority, and was impressed by the nervous respect the man showed Solas, but she was unaccustomed to letting out the inn’s rooms to elves. 

They climbed to the third floor, where two rooms were tucked under the eaves. The maid pointed them to the left, and inside the room, Solas saw rows of rope beds poking out against the wall opposite the windows. 

“You’ll have it to yourselves,” the girl chattered nervously. “Normally we’d be full up, but there’s no travelers this year, what with the war on in Orlais and the troubles with the mages here in Ferelden. All the lord’s men have gone up north to Haven for the Conclave, anyway.” 

Nue looked into the room offered with interest, then looked across the hall, where a better-appointed room featured a single, larger bed with a thick mattress and embroidered counterpane. She abruptly wrapped her left arm around Solas’ right. 

“Oh, but do you think we could have the other, instead?” Nue asked, her voice so sweet it could have been spread on toast. “Since it’s our honeymoon, and all.” 

The maid blushed, shooting Solas a knowing look out of the corner of her eye, and Solas was pleasantly surprised to discover that after several thousand years, he was still capable of being embarrassed. 

“How long are you staying?” the maid asked. “If it’s just up to me…” 

“Only the one night,” Nue said. “But, you know how men can be a bit loud, at times…” she ran a possessive hand over Solas’ back, perilously low, smirking as she did so, and he became aware that he was being punished for scaring off the wretched little stableboy. 

“Of course,” Dannatha said, smiling conspiratorially at Nue. “You’ll have your privacy.” 

She hurried away down the stairs, risking a snickering look back up at them. 

Solas held his breath for Nue to ask him questions he could not particularly answer, but Nue only swanned into the larger room, looking appreciatively at the carved wooden furniture, the heavy wool tartan curtains, and, of course, the bed.

“Never done it on a bed before,” Nue said, bobbing on her heels to bounce experimentally on the edge of the mattress. 

“Nue…” Solas began, shaking his head at her to cover his smile. 

The woman flopped to her back, holding her arms out to him. “I blush to confess that I don’t actually know what that means, what you’ve been calling me.” 

Solas went to her, gathering up her hands and holding them loosely against the thick, fluffy pillows. He let his weight pin her down against the bed, enjoying the way she squirmed back. 

“It means ‘trouble,’” he told her, rubbing the tip of his nose against hers, very relieved that she did not intend to pursue the reasons for the ostler’s deference.

“Me?!” she asked in an incredulous giggle. 

He hummed in confirmation, nuzzling across her face until he found the soft swell of her earlobe and nipping it. “I was supposed to be in Orlais by Satinalia,” he said. 

Nue didn’t immediately respond, and he wondered if he’d said too much. But his destination had to be obvious--he was headed west, and Honnleath marked the start of the pass. She had to be traveling in the same direction, even if he still didn’t know why. Dalish clans exchanged members sometimes, he knew. If she were traveling merely to afford some other Dalish group a new hunter, he had a better role available for her. 

“Well, it’s too late to attempt the pass today,” Nue finally said. “You might as well show me what these beds are for. Will I want one, once the Dalish have their palaces back?” 

It was possible she was still making fun of him, Solas thought, as he began to strip her clothing off, but he didn’t quite get the joke. In any event, he was pleased for the opportunity to bend her in half, delicate ankles around his ears, without having to worry about her back or his knees on the hard ground. Not that Nue had previously allowed the position at all: previous intimacy had involved Nue tossing a leg across his hips or slipping a hand down his trousers when she decided it was morning, and he’d slept long enough. 

He hadn’t complained, anyway. It was worth waking up for. 

She lay against his body afterwards, Solas enjoying the goosedown pillows to his back and the warm weight of a relaxed woman in his arms. His hand smoothed over her hip and between her legs. Even though his spend was still smeared on her thighs, he thought he might wring another orgasm out of her still. 

She announced herself cautiously positive on the subject of beds, and he chuckled in her ear. 

“It will be a few weeks at least until the next one, I am afraid,” he told her. “This is the last town of size for a hundred miles, and our experience back at the last hamlet makes me cautious of the human villages.”

She didn’t respond, instead shifting to curl herself up between his spread legs, cheek against his chest. 

Solas pulled his hand back to rest it on the dip in her waist. 

“But yes, you should have a bed,” he said. 

He had not enjoyed thinking about where Nue would be once he brought down the Veil, but the plan had begun to crystallize. Felassan and his agents would be responsible for the mirror maze; the Crossroads would be relatively safe. 

Solas lifted Nue’s chin with his thumb so that she had to look up at him. Her soft brown eyes were a little distant as he captured them. 

“After I cross the mountains, I have to meet my--my friend. In Orlais. I believe you would--yes, you would like him. And he would approve of you.” Solas chuckled ruefully. “I know he would, actually.” He couldn’t imagine the man’s amusement when he showed up with a Dalish in tow after what they’d faced with Clan Vir’nehn. 

Nue cocked her head. “I can’t tell whether you’re feeling me out for a threesome or trying to pass me off to him instead. I guess my answers are ‘maybe someday’ and ‘no thank you?’”

Solas choked. “Neither!” 

Nue’s mouth twisted in half a smile. 

“He is exploring a group of ancient artifacts at present, and I believe he would benefit from your assistance,” Solas said, and that was true enough. Felassan’s cooking had tended to taste like ashes, which were often a large constituent part. If Nue did nothing more than handle the logistics of sleeping and eating, Solas’ agents would be far more likely to survive than under Felassan’s negligent administration. 

“Is that what you do?” she asked. Her voice was hesitant. “I know you’ve had a bad experience with the Dalish, but--that’s what’s what _we_ do, too.”

It was tempting to let her imagine him as simply an archivist of the ruins of the Elvhen. Because he knew that she liked the idea. What a romantic notion--he was simply a collector of the beauty remaining in the world, stumbling into the same in the form of a Dalish woman who evoked all the qualities of the People he’d thought lost forever. He hated to let her assume only the best of him. 

“No,” he said softly, and he knew he’d waited too long to answer, and she’d tensed against him. “That’s not all of it.” 

She absorbed that for a moment, as well as the implications when he said no more. 

“I can’t,” she said, picking up the last thread of his request. Her voice seemed forced to casualness. “I’m headed north next, anyway.” 

Nue rolled off his chest, sitting up and shaking her hair back over her shoulders. She smiled faintly at the consternation on his face. 

“I hear the flutes,” she said, cocking her head at the window. It was sunset by the way the red light streamed around the curtains. “Can we go see the dancing?” 

Without waiting for his response, she began braiding her hair back up with the assistance of the mirror hanging on the back of the door. She looked back at him, still prone on the bed, and cast him an encouraging look. 

“All the People are going too,” she told him. “It’s safe. Some of them are even in the band.” 

Solas eventually nodded and reached for his discarded clothing. Nue smiled at him. She caught his hand in hers and briefly pressed a kiss across his knuckles. Solas couldn’t manage to return the expression even as he let his hand linger on her face. He was wounded, again, by her resolute lack of need for him, and her contrary decision to want him anyway.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Kinkshame me on Twitter @YTCShepard and Tumblr @ YoursTrulyCommanderShepard
> 
> Also, someone hold me until we after we maybe get a trailer next Thursday.


	6. Chapter 6

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> "Persist and resist the temptation to ask you if one thing had been different, would everything be different today?"

Solas slept poorly, for all that the bed was a very good one. He would sit up with a start, reaching for the woman still drooling onto his chest, then recall that he should not wake her up. They both had miles to travel the next day. He slipped in and out of the Fade, where the immediate past and his plans for future warred for his attention. 

_“Careful, it is stronger than it tastes,” Solas told Nue when she put the entire bottle to her lips and tipped her head back._

_“I have had wine before,” Nue replied, unconvincingly. It stained her mouth and cheeks red._

His agents in Honnleath were waiting for him, eager to describe the absence of the local lord and all his knights, gone north to the peace talks between the mages and Templars. Solas told them to build a supply base and loot everything that would not be missed. 

_Nue had bought or stolen two large hand pies full of ground lamb and peas. “These are both for me,” she teased him. She gave him one when he didn’t object, then watched him to be sure he ate it._

Solas dreamed further west, looking for Felassan. He couldn’t find his dreams. He hoped the man had not gotten distracted and wandered off-mission. 

_Nue stood in the middle of a crowd of children, watching the juggler. She let the smallest trace the shapes of her vallaslin with chubby fingers. The bonfires around the square tinted the night red._

In Orlais, Grey Wardens had nightmares. They dreamed that they were all dying. 

_The last year’s vintage was overripe, Solas thought, watching the stableboy attempt to teach Nue the quadrille. Solas tossed the lees in the grass and opened another bottle. The new year’s wine was raw, with a metallic fault. It tasted like iron. Nue came and took his glass from unresisting fingers, and when she kissed him, the wine tasted sweeter on her lips._

He met with Revas on the outskirts of the Dales. 

“The magister found the focus almost immediately,” his agent reported. She could not conceal her anxiety in the Fade. “He has more support than we thought.” 

“Where did he take it?” Solas snarled. 

“We do not know,” the Elvhen woman replied. “But I will try to track him.”

_Nue dragged him into the square, telling him that she knew all the dances. She didn’t, but she laughed when she stumbled, tugging on his arm to stay upright. The drone of the bellows pipe against the snap of the tabor gave an air of unreality to the scene. Solas thought he might be drunk._

In the Fade, Honnleath was home to Fear. “The mages here fear that their neighbors will someday turn on them. The neighbors fear the mages will be the ones to turn. I eat well here,” it told Solas. Solas considered crushing it in his jaws, but he had killed nothing the entire time he had known Nue, and he was hesitant to start again.

_They leaned on each other as they climbed the stairs, shoulders bumping and hips brushing. His head spun. Nue giggled when he fumbled with the key to the room._

There was a memory of the Hero of Ferelden preserved in the Fade. She tried to save a child from Desire, a spirit that longed to see the mortal world again. The hero tricked the spirit, and her companions were proud. 

_“It’s too soft,” Nue complained of the bed. “Do you mind if I use you as my pillow?” He did not mind._

* * *

Solas awoke to someone shaking his shoulder. The fuzz of sleep and loss of the Fade finally brightened into Nue’s face. Her hair was braided up for travel, and she already had her pack loaded up on her shoulders. Soft white light pooled below the edges of the wool tartan curtains. 

“Hey,” she said softly. “It’s morning.”

Solas instinctively reached for his shirt, but Nue pushed him back against the pillows with a gentle hand. 

“You don’t have to get up yet,” she said. “It’s just now dawn. I wanted to…” Her voice trailed off. Her face was a little puffy, but she was far more alert than he felt. 

The realization that Nue was leaving without him was swift and sudden, like a knife to the gut. He endured a dizzy wave of nausea, remembering how much wine he had drunk the night before. 

“But you are going,” Solas croaked out. His mouth tasted foul--he’d drunk far too much.

Nue’s lids were heavy over her eyes as she gazed down at her hands on the counterpane. “I have a map of the trail,” she said. “I think I can make the second campsite if I leave now.” 

“I see,” Solas replied. He didn’t agree, but what possible grounds did he have to object? She was traveling north. He was headed west. Their paths were no longer congruent. He’d made the offer to come with him, instead, and she’d turned him down. There was nothing else for him to say. He didn’t know why she was waiting, anyway. 

He gathered the resolve and reserve that had sustained him through ages she could not possibly imagine. He drew it into his lungs like winter air.

Nue watched as he pulled himself together. 

“Well, safe travels,” he said when he was sure of himself, his tone serene and icy. His voice seemed to issue from somewhere feet above his head, from some other body. “Dareth shiral.” 

Nue waited almost another minute without looking at the door. But when he said no more, she gave a small nod. He nearly gave himself away by flinching when she reached up to cup his cheek, but he forced himself to stillness. She leaned in to press a warm, closemouthed kiss to the corner of his mouth, disregarding his utter lack of response. Her braid slipped over her shoulder and struck his chest for the last time. 

“Be safe, Blue-Eyes,” she told him, nearly whispering. 

He stared resolutely at her feet as she straightened, took a last look around the room, and went out the door, closing it behind her. 

Solas slouched down in bed as soon as she was gone, telling himself that he could go back to sleep and touch the Fade again. It was still night in Orlais. He might yet reach Felassan. There was work to do. 

He closed his eyes, but they wouldn’t stay shut. He didn’t even realize they were open again until he found himself staring at his pack, lying empty on the sideboard next to his belongings. The terrible, bearskin cap was folded next to it. 

His chest and nose burned. 

He ought to just go. Regardless of when most travelers attempted the pass, there was no reason to linger in Honnleath any longer. Solas tossed off the sheets and dressed himself with swift, jerky motions. He repacked his backpack, searching for his sketchbook until he recalled that he’d given it away.

The thought made anger kindle in the back of his throat and drip down into his chest. He hadn’t even finished writing down the pluperfect yet. How was Nue ever going to learn to speak Elvish without the ability to describe actions that had completed before an unspecified point in time?

Another wave of nausea swept through him, and Solas gave a moment of consideration to vomiting out the window. He had not been hungover for a few thousand years, but he recalled that he’d liked it very little every time before. He would see if the inn’s kitchen offered fruit juice or something that might settle his stomach before he left. 

Solas grabbed the hat to shove it into his pack, and when he lifted it, he spilled the waxed paper sack of granola it concealed to the ground. Nue must have begged it from the irascible cook; there were bits of dried fruit and honeyed nut clusters in it. 

He hated porridge, and Nue had noticed. 

That last thought sent a bolt of inchoate distress through him, and before he could acknowledge his own course, he threw open the door and was running down the stairs of the inn. He bolted out the front door and into the innyard. It was very early still, only half an hour or so past dawn. All of the residents of Honnleath were still sleeping off the previous night’s revels, and no smoke yet rose from the chimneys of the businesses around the inn. 

Solas cast about wildly, but there was nobody in sight, nor visible trail on the graveled roads of the town. What position was the rising sun in this time of year, anyway? East or northeast?

“Lose your bride?” a sour voice called out behind him. Solas wheeled and saw the stableboy poke his head out of the barn. 

He didn’t answer the boy so much as grimace, but the redheaded elf pointed out a thin lane branching off the main thoroughfare. “Better go find her and apologize,” the irritating child told him. 

Solas did not bother to correct his misapprehension that Solas was the one who needed to apologize, instead walking as fast as his dignity allowed out of town, then jogging when he recalled that Nue had always seemed to move much faster than him. 

He didn’t see her when he passed out the back gate of the town or when the path narrowed to a small track. He was well outside of town before he truly panicked, thinking that the stableboy had given him the wrong direction, or Solas had lost his way.

He called her name, startling the morning birds. He remembered that he didn’t even know her real name: she hadn’t told him. She had never planned to stay. 

Regardless, he yelled it again. There were no other travelers on the path north, but he didn’t know whether that made him look more or less of a perfect idiot. 

He had nearly given up when he heard Vherlen’s snort of disapproval. Solas spun to see the woman and the halla melting out of the trees. Of course, Nue preferred to stay off the main road, where the only travelers were armed humans headed to their peace talks. 

Solas told himself he was a monster for being gratified to see that her eyes were a little red, because he was sure he was in as much disarray as he’d been since he’d been her patient. 

Nue’s lower lip twitched as she searched his face.

“Are you coming?” she asked, wide-eyed, her voice catching. 

Her expression fell when she realized that he was not. He’d disappointed her again. 

Solas’ chest ached: he was still coughing in the mornings. He never felt like he could catch his breath since he’d met her. He tried to get it all out, anyway.

“No. Come with me instead,” he said, trying to make it sound like logic, rather than begging. “You will have the chance to help your people, I promise. You will understand when you see. Change is coming, and soon.” Thoughts that had been crystalline in his mind were difficult to access in the moment, with her looking at him patiently. “I do not know if you will agree. With what I still must do. But if anyone could, you will.”

Her expression was puzzled. He was giving her little enough to work with. And more than he ought. 

“I know things are changing,” she explained to him, her forehead creased in concern. “That’s why I’m away from my clan in the first place, to find out why and how. But I can’t go with you. I need to be back by spring--we always need every hunter then. It’s the lean season.” 

Her worried frown was an impasse he did not know how to overcome. 

“Ask me,” he said, at a loss for what to do and increasingly desperate. “Ask me. What you want to know. What you want me to do. My name is Solas, for a start. Ask me what else I have been called. What the Dalish have called me.” 

Nue set her pack down with a little sigh, even though he could tell she was anxious to go. His own hands hung limp at his side, and she came and gathered them in her own. Her thumbs traced over his knuckles as she considered his offer, then rejected it. 

“You don’t want to tell me, because you think it will break my heart to know,” she said. “Well, I won’t make you. You don’t have to. I have to go, anyway.” 

Nue’s tone was firm. His mind was full of cobwebs, and he couldn’t make sense of what she was saying. He didn’t have to--what? Tell her? Hurt her? Follow through on any of the plans he had not shared with her? 

“You think I should go with you instead,” he accused her. “You think I would be better off with the Dalish. Convince me, then! Tell me why I should go with you when I know that nothing will ever change if I do.” 

Nue listened to him patiently, but nothing he said was drawing the reaction he wanted. Her mind was made up, and she did not intend to change his. 

Her lips pressed in a soft line. “You know what the Dalish have to offer, Blue-Eyes. What I do. It’s not a gift if I make you take it, though.”

She hadn’t said it to hurt him, but he pressed a fist against his heart, hunching over it. It did hurt. 

She squeezed his hand, then wrapped her arms around his chest. Her fingertips dug into the muscles of his back. It was the goodbye embrace he should have given her back at the inn. Solas buried his face in the side of her neck until she pulled away. 

“The first time I saw you, I thought you were lost in the woods,” she told him. “I hope you find what you’re looking for, but even if you don’t, we’ll still be there.” Her expression was gentle but resolute. He could not even remember what it felt like to be that sure that he was in the right. 

“How would I even tell you? If I do,” he pleaded. Her simple decency might leave no mark on the Fade for him to trace, in either this world or the world he would rebuild. 

She swung her pack back onto her shoulders and gestured at the halla, who trotted to her side. She was still leaving. 

“The clan will be moving east towards Wycome this time of year,” she told him as she turned to go. “Clan Lavellan. They wouldn’t be hard to find. I’m Ellana. Ask for Ellana Lavellan.” 

Her throat bobbed, but she pasted an encouraging smile on her face. She blinked rapidly, then tipped her head back to clear her vision. When she had her bearings, she turned to the north, along the long trail running the length of the Frostback Mountains. She took the first step away, even though he still hadn’t moved. 

Solas watched for a long time, until the horizon swallowed the two small figures, and the song of birds told him he was alone again. 

~FIN~

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Lest the ending be read as more "am cry" than hopeful that Solas and Ellana will get it right the next time, Beaubeau has illustrated the epilogue as the final chapter.


	7. Epilogue Comic

#SaveFelassan!

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Alt-text: Fen'Harel looms behind Felassan, who cringes, speaking his last words from the Masked Empire, until he notices that Solas is wearing a terrible bearskin hat. 
> 
> F: "There's something different about you."  
> S: "I met a woman."  
> F: "That explains it."
> 
> Solas turns to go.
> 
> S: "Let us be off."  
> F. "Aren't you going to kill me?"  
> S: "Should I?"  
> F: "No thank you. Where to?"  
> S: "The Conclave."
> 
> Thanks for reading! Kinkshame us on Twitter @YTCShepard and @beaubashley, or on Tumblr as YoursTrulyCommanderShepard and beaubashley.


	8. But Wait...There's More

This fic is finished as it is. But if you want to narrow all those delicious possibilities for how Solas and Nue work things out now that he's had a taste of mortality, check the related works. <3.

Yours Truly,

Commander Shepard.

**Author's Note:**

> Kinkshame me on Twitter @YTCShepard and Tumblr @ YoursTrulyCommanderShepard.

**Works inspired by this one:**

  * [Long Story Short, It Was a Bad Time](https://archiveofourown.org/works/29333109) by [Yours_Truly_Commander_Shepard](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Yours_Truly_Commander_Shepard/pseuds/Yours_Truly_Commander_Shepard)




End file.
